Sales Analysis Report

[rmladden]

The sales analysis report seems to report payments as of the invoice order date, not the payment date. So a payment made in March for a February invoice increases the February total. In the US, we need to report to our taxing authorities based on when we actually get the money.

Am I correct about the way the report is working? If so, can it be changed?

[Mike Hughes]

That would have to be an option as here in the UK the 'official' date is when the invoice is created.

While we're on this topic, could one of sales report options be to sort 'sales by date'. This would make it much easier to compare sales with accounting records such as payments into the bank etc.

Thanks

Mike

[rmladden]

In the US we report sales tax either monthly or quarterly and is due 30 days after the end of the period. So if I don't get paid for an invoice by then, it will never show up in the report because then I'll be reporting the next period.

[cdicken]

Bob

I'd contact Jan at http://www.mole-end.biz/ as she should be able to customise you a sales report (at a very reasonable fee) that does what you want.

[Jan]

I'm not sure that much can be done here, the selection criteria for the report is added to the report when the program is run, there is also a lot of preprocessing (ie. data munging) done before this report is run.

If you had a very specific requirement I could write a report specifically for you. I also have a set of referrer reports and I think that the orders by referrer might be suitable with a few small tweaks - eg wipping out the referrer groups and adding more tax details (see http://www.mole-end.biz/acatalog/One...oDet.html#SAAR for more details, the one I was thinking of is called Transactions by Referrer with Order Details)

The other place to look is at the transaction reports if any of those are suitable they can be installed as user defined reports which means that you can specify the date.

Regards,

[rmladden]

All of the reports seem to filter on order date, not paid date.

Jan, I'll post on the Mole End forum.

[Jan]

The reports are all user defined reports in Actinic, this means that the date to check is specified in reports.ini and also there is no extra processing in Actinic before the reports are run. Which is why I thought of those.

Cheers,

[rmladden]

What I don't understand about the method is what happens if the invoice is never paid. Do you send the tax on the invoice anyway? If you wait until the invoices are paid, do you have to keep reporting that month multiple times?

[Mike Hughes]

It get's complicated but generally larger companies base their accounts (and taxes) on an accrual basis whereas smaller companies might use a cash basis.

Essentially, accounting on an accrual basis uses the date on which the service or product expense is incurred (i.e. on the invoice date) or used rather than when it is paid for.

This can have several different effects on accounting policy. For example:

- A capital purchase (for example computer or IT equipment) can be amortised over several years.
- Service charges (for example annual web hosting charges) might be split across different financial years.
- Allowances, or provisions, have to be made for bad debts (to cover invoices that have been issued but not paid, etc).

It's a huge subject, and I'm sure this isn't the best place (nor me the best person) to go into the details.

Mike

[rmladden]

I hate accounting. How do you know how much tax you actually collected each month? Do you send more than you have collected hoping the rest will come in later? If not, do you go back to that month several times to see if you collected more? How do you keep track of the difference?