Sales reports use the current seating plans as their reference, and therefore any changes made to the instances will reflect on your reports. This means historical data (e.g. "total sales made yesterday") are best run as accounting reports, because sales reports are prone to change when tickets are edited.
Choosing the right report type
Sales reports in Spektrix take their data from the sales tables for each event. If you were to run any of our standard reports as a CSV rather than a PDF, you would see that the data outputs one line for each seat. Against each seat is recorded some basic information about the sale - the customer name, and any/all attributes set against the event or instance. You will not be able to cross-reference customer or order data here. For example you cannot ascertain what other shows the customer booked for using a sales report, as that data is not recorded in the sales table.
You can choose to aggregate some fields before the report outputs the data (this is set during the report setup), and it is therefore possible to make the reports sum all sold tickets, or each type or ticket type, before reaching excel or PDF. It's also possible to turn that data into good-looking tables and summaries, as many of our standard reports do.
Why sales data may change
All the information is taken from the current status of each seat.
The sales data does not record historical information, or acknowledge any previous seat histories. Yet some of our reports - particularly custom reports that venues might have asked for - will attempt to break down sales by date, or compare one sales period to another. This is prone to change, as the report is taking data from the seating table, which likely looks like this:
|
Seat |
Order Date |
Cost |
|
Seat A |
10/09/2012 |
£10 |
|
Seat B |
10/09/2012 |
£10 |
|
Seat C |
11/09/2012 |
£10 |
A summary of these sales for 10 Sep would be £20 (2 seats), and 11 Sep would be £10 (1 seat). Yet as soon as a customer from 10 Sep telephones to amend his order (perhaps just moving seats, not even changing the quantity or price), the order date would change to today. Therefore, a summary of 10/09/2012 would drop to just £10 (1 ticket) if the report were run again.
The important thing to remember is that each new change to orders within Spektrix generates a new transaction (a new instance of choosing Phone/Counter/Counter Quick and starting a new or updated order), and every time this happens, the order date stamp upon the ticket will refresh. If you are relying upon sales reports to provide you with historical sales data, you will find that exchanges, refunds, cancellations and shifts cause your reports to change and update unexpectedly.
Solution
You should therefore use Accounting reports to report on solid historical sales data: because these take their data from the payment tables, they will always be accessing the same payment fields, and will never change (orders made yesterday will never be overwritten as newer).