Overview

Minor differences be reports offered by Shopify and your point of sale are expected. For some folks with high volume or looking at a large time frame, reconcile these financial reports between your online store and point of sale may even be challenging. The following are some key reasons why some reports may not line up exactly.

Example of Sales Report Differences

Shopify Sales Total Report	Lightspeed Sale Totals Report

In the example above the Shopify total sale is $47,308.74 by contrast the Lightspeed total w/tax shows $47,656.90

Date Range

Shopify's sale report can include transactions which were modified during the time frame you select. For example, refunds are attributed to the same reporting period as the order was created in, regardless of when the refund was actually completed. See Refunds below for more on this behavior.

Calculations and Rounding

Shopify and your point of sale were developed by different teams. Each use different strategies for calculations and rounding up or down for discounts, shipping and taxes.

Refunds

If you are wondering why the number of online orders and the totals do not match the number of sales and totals uploaded to my point of sale? The answer is refunds.

Shopify attempts to keep things simple by updating an existing transaction whenever there is a refund. This means that refunds can impact revenue reported in prior months or reporting cycles.

Most point of sales do not allow you to edit a transaction after it is complete. Because of this, refunds from Shopify are downloaded as a new transaction to your point of sale. For your convenience each return references the originating Shopify order.

Taxes

Some point of sales solutions calculate taxes internally, others allow the tax amount to be directly entered exactly as the appear on your Shopify order. Additionally many point of sales solutions only support one combined tax rate for uploaded transactions. Shopify can provide more nuanced reporting for your online sales.

Discounts

If you offer both line item discounts and order discounts this can create a conflicts where a line item is discounted more than once. Presently this stacking of discounts is not supported. Shopify itself is only just starting to support combined discounts. For more see: Shopify's Manual: Combining discounts

Some point of sales solutions calculate discounts internally, others allow the discounts amount to be directly entered exactly as the appear on your Shopify order.

What actions can I take?

Understanding that there will be a variance between reports is important. For example, rounding errors are usually no more than a fraction of 1 percent over the course of a month. Still, there are steps you can and should take to help minimize the difference in reporting between systems.

Steps to take when generating or reviewing reports.

The most over looked step is recheck the date range for each report you generate.
Check your reports more frequently. Frequent checks on your reports means fewer orders to review and verify.
Minimize the use or combined discounts. Until support is available for combined discounts, we recommend adjusting your settings in Shopify to disable stacking discounts. If this is not an option for you, then use the Shopify reports as your primary reference.
We recommend using the Shopify Taxes report for the most detailed results.
In Shopify Admin, navigate to Analytics > Reports then Search "taxes"

If you have questions about the nature of any differences you see in your reports please don't hesitate to speak with our chat support team.