The Sales card is the sum of your accepted orders in the period. Not requests, not quotes you have sent, not anything still waiting: orders somebody said yes to.
Why it includes VAT
Every price a customer sees in the calculator is a price with VAT in it, because that is the price they will pay. Revenue is the sum of those, so it carries VAT too. It is the number that matches what actually lands in your account.
When the figure without VAT appears, and when it does not
Underneath, CaterWay shows the figure without VAT, but only when it can work it out from the orders themselves rather than assuming a rate.
It splits an order by the VAT rate recorded on each of its lines. If every line of every order in the period has a rate, the split is exact and you get the number. If some orders were written before you set up your VAT classes, those lines carry no rate at all, and there is nothing to split them by.
In that case the card says how many orders it could not split, and leaves the figure out. That is deliberate. Picking a likely rate and applying it would produce a number that looks authoritative, gets copied into an email to an accountant, and is wrong.
Heads up
The gap closes going forward, not backwards. Setting up VAT classes today does not add a rate to orders that were written without one. The split figure becomes reliable for periods after the setup.
The VAT card
Under Customers there is a card for VAT alone. Same orders as Sales, split by the rate recorded on each line: a row per rate, the totals, and a month by month table when the period covers more than one month.
The rates are the ones that were snapshotted when the customer sent the order. Changing a product's tax class today does not rewrite an order taken last spring, which is why two orders for the same dish can sit on different rows.
Two buttons at the top of the card decide which date the period is counted on. By event date counts the same accepted orders as the Sales card, on the day the food went out. By invoice date counts the invoices you issued in the period instead, using the VAT figures frozen on each invoice when it was created. Deposit requests and voided invoices stay out of that count, because a deposit carries the whole order's VAT while its own sum is only part of the money.
It is a summary of what this system recorded, not a filing. Your accounting software is still the book of record, and the card says so at the bottom of every PDF it goes into.
If the number looks wrong
Three things to check before assuming a bug.
Is it the period, not the total? Sales counts by event date, so orders you took this month for next year are not in this month. Is the order actually accepted? A quote you sent and feel confident about is not revenue until the customer accepts it. Are you comparing like with like? The Requests and quotes card counts by arrival date, so its totals will not add up to the Sales card and are not meant to.Was this article helpful?