This is a list of things to investigate if you experience a report not matching another report of the same reporting period.

Financial reports will include completed invoices types. This would be “C”ash, “L”ookup Cash and “A”/R Invoices as they post to the General Ledger. Unless there is an option to include the would not typically include incomplete types such as “W”ork Orders or La“Y”aways or “E”stimates. If you are comparing a report that includes incompleted types against one that excludes, this can explain the discrepancy.

• Best Practice:  Review what types of invoices are being included in the report.

With supervisor privileges, a user with rights can change the category that an inventory item resides in. This will change where sales history will land in inventory reports but NOT change income and cost of goods ledgers where past invoices have been posted to.  Looking back on reports that look at these areas will have different results after such a change. Many times this change is made as it is the right thing for the sales team to keep inventory sales history with an item but forget to tell the financial stakeholders which run reports against these areas.

• Best Practice:  Restrict who has supervisor privileges.

Using the feature to place a general ledger code directly onto an invoice makes accounting easy but has a sales report consequence. This value will be included in invoice sales reports but will not match the revenue for inventory sold detail reports as a GL code is not an inventory item.

• Best Practice Solution:  Create a CATEGORY and INVENTORY item to sell and use that on an invoice instead. You can then use a journal entry to direct the income sold from the inventory item, into the correct general ledger for accounting.

If you are not running integrity report this can have a ledger, invoice reports and detail reports not matching as it depends on the view of the data that a report totals against.  If the integrity error is the invoice total does not match the detail.  This can be why a summary report does not match the detail reporting.

• Best Practice:  Make a habit to run integrity reports on a regular basis.

With category security, an administrator can make changes to the category income and cost of goods sold ledger codes for a category. This would impact the “Main Category Income and Expense” and “Main Category Profitability” ledger reports.

• Best Practice:  Restrict who has privileges to make this type of financial change.