Total paid £12, and the five that went back unsaid
After a part refund the receipt still read Total paid £12.00, and the till’s refunds list never showed it because it filtered by status. Both read the sum now.
Refund five pounds of a twelve-pound order and the order is still paid. That is correct: seven pounds of it was. But the receipt the guest could open afterwards said Total paid £12.00 and nothing else, which is a document that was true on the day and stopped being true at the refund. And the till’s own Recent refunds and voids list, the screen a manager opens to check what went back, did not show the refund at all. A full refund appeared. A part refund never did.
Both faults had the same shape. The list was filtered by the order’s status, and a part refund does not change the status, because the order is still paid. The receipt was built from the order’s total, and a part refund does not change the total either, because the guest did pay it. Status is one word and total is one figure, and the refund lived in neither. It lived in the payments beneath the order, as a sum nobody was adding up.
Reading the sum
The receipt builder now takes the refunded amount and, when it is above zero, adds two lines under the total: Refunded −£5.00 and After refund £7.00, the second in bold because it is the figure the guest cares about. The guest’s copy and the printed one read the same sum. The orders list carries a refunded total on every row, so the refunds screen keeps an order that has any money back, whatever its status, and the row reads Refunded £5.00 of £12.00 rather than pretending it was all or nothing.
A tester found this by refunding part of an order and then looking for it, which is exactly what a manager does when a guest comes back to ask. Any report keyed on a status word will miss money that moved without changing the word. If the question is about money, read the money.