The sales report that said £0 to a kitchen that had taken £800
A sales report can be built from the wrong table and look fine for months. Ours priced the stock that left the shelf at the ingredient’s selling price — which is zero, because nobody sells a tortilla. What it should have read, and what “sales” has to mean.
Open the Sales report for a kitchen that has taken thirty-two orders this summer and it says £0.00. Two hundred and nine "orders". A unit count with a decimal point in it. Nothing has crashed, nothing is red, and a vendor who trusts the screen concludes that the report is for somebody else's kind of business and stops opening it.
Here is what had happened. The report was built from stock movements — every time a dish is sold, the recipe takes its ingredients off the shelf, and each of those is a movement with a quantity. The report added up those movements and priced each one at the product's selling price. But a product on the shelf is an ingredient. Flour, chicken, a case of cans. Nobody sells a tortilla to a guest, so its selling price is zero, and zero times anything is the figure at the top of the screen. The "209 orders" were the movements. The 140.5 "units" were kilograms.
The price a guest paid is on the order, not on the shelf. So the report now reads the orders: every paid one in the period, at the price charged, for the venue you are looking at. Same day boundaries as the till (the venue's day, not the server's), same fence around which kitchens you may see.
What "sales" has to mean
An order's total is not the kitchen's sales. It has a service charge in it, perhaps a surcharge, a tip, sometimes a delivery fee or a hall fee or a charity round-up. None of those is turnover the kitchen earned on food, and every one of them has its own line elsewhere. So the figure the Sales report adds up is the food: the total with those pieces taken off, whole refunds left out, a refunded line worth nothing. It is the same definition the profit and VAT reports already used — which is the point. Two screens that define "sales" differently will one day disagree in front of a customer, and the argument about which is right takes longer than either was worth.
Categories and top products come from the order lines now too, grouped by the dish. And the same fault turned out to live in three more places — the dashboard chart, a gross-profit grid, a reconciliation screen — because a number that is easy to compute wrongly tends to get computed wrongly more than once. All of them read the order now. The lesson is dull and worth having: when a report shows zero for a business you know is trading, do not assume the business is quiet.