Reports - Financial Terminology

Gross vs net sales? Payment types? What should you be paying attention to?

 

After a full day's worth of sales, it's usually not enough to just see how much money was collected. BLAZE's analytical reports aim to make sense of these numbers not only for the business owner but also for their accountants.

Reports can be seen under the Dashboard > Products > Analytics tab. Here are some definitions to understand:

Gross sales

  • Represents revenue collected before refunds and discounts

  • Do not include taxes

  • This should not be the main financial statistic for your business, as it's not representative of your true financial performance

  • Your main financial statistic should be "Net sales"

Refunds

  • Represents money returned to customers during refunds

  • Do not include taxes

Discounts

  • Represents reductions in revenues due to discounts

  • Do not include taxes

Net sales

  • Gross sales - refunds - discounts

  • Do not include taxes

  • This should be the main financial statistic for your business, as it closely represents the money the store takes in at the end of the day

Costs

Profits

  • Profits = Net sales - Costs

Taxes

  • Each product is attached to a tax group, which consists of one or more individual taxes

  • BLAZE calculates taxes using Item-Level Calculations and because of this the amount of sales tax you collected and the amount of sales tax you actually file may be off by a few pennies or a few dollars, depending on variables such as your sales volume and your pricing. 

Payment types

  • If you want to know simply how much money was collected in a time period, payment types are what you are looking for

  • Total payments = Net sales + taxes