Why two sales numbers do not match

Almost every "the reports disagree" question comes down to one of the reasons below. Work through them in order before raising it as a fault.

1. One is live and the other is from last night

By far the most common. Transactions, Work in Progress and Tribe Results sales count right now; the dashboard headline and the charts were built overnight. Compare them the morning after, not the same afternoon.

2. One counts every sale, the other only attributed ones

A source or industry breakdown showing far less than the headline is usually counting only sales it can credit to marketing.

3. A platform is excluded from the headline graphs

EZCATER IS EXCLUDED BY DEFAULT

Orders from an excluded platform still appear in Transactions, Sale Products and the food dashboards, but are deliberately left out of the headline graphs. That produces a report showing sales the dashboard does not. Check Reporting Settings — each platform has an In main graphs switch.

4. Two reports with the same name measure different things

Customer Source exists on both the organisation and tribe dashboards and they are not the same report. The organisation version groups by the source recorded against each sale. The tribe version groups by the lead source worked out for the customer's company. They will not reconcile, and neither is wrong.

5. Conversion rate is not the two columns beside it

ON TRIBE RESULTS, SALES AND ESTIMATES COME FROM DIFFERENT PLACES

The Sales column is counted live; the estimates and the conversion rate come from the overnight rebuild and use attributed sales. Dividing the two columns shown on screen will not reproduce the conversion rate, and that is expected.

6. Ignoring a transaction does not change everything

AN IGNORED SALE STILL COUNTS IN THE HEADLINE FIGURE

Ticking Ignore this transaction removes it from the Customer Source, Distribution, industry, custom-dashboard and product-report figures once they rebuild — but it does not remove it from the dashboard's headline Sales number or from Marketing Channels. If you ignore a large mistaken order and the headline does not move, this is why.

7. Refund-heavy periods

Credit notes arrive as their own negative orders. A day whose refunds exceed its sales is treated as zero in the headline figures rather than going negative, while the Customer Source and custom-dashboard figures net properly. On a heavy refund week the two will differ, and the netted one is the truer number.

8. Year boundaries

A few figures count the calendar year in universal time rather than your own, so in the first days of January a small difference between screens is normal and settles by itself.

When it really is wrong

If a sale is missing from Transactions altogether, none of the above applies — that is a sync problem. Go to the Connection Status Report.

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