Cash Based Reports
All cash based reports reflect transactions that occurred on a particular date, and the payments or refunds you received for those transactions on that date. These reports only concern themselves with the cash or payments that were made on the date range selected. If money exchanged hands, then the transaction will show up on this report.
List of cash based reports:
Accrual Based Reports
Accrual based accounting reports are reflecting orders (POS and Online Store orders) that have an Order Date within the date range regardless if the order is pending, open, closed or quoted. For Parties or Online Booked Parties the report uses the Party execution date (aka Party start date) within the date range for the report. The Accrual report does not report transactions. This report only cares about what is invoiced on the order. So if you have $100 of Item A on an invoice for that date but you have no payments against the invoice, the Accrual report will show that you "earned" $100 in Item A but your Cash report would show no payments made. If you do not want items on an invoice to be counted towards your sales/revenue you must either remove those items or cancel the order. Cancelled orders are reported in a different section of the Accrual report. If you plan to use the Accrual report for accounting purposes, it is important to cancel unused orders or remove the items from these orders to get an accurate report!
For this reason, the cash and accrual reports will rarely match and if by some odd reason they do match, it is just a fluke as they are considered two completely different accounting principles.
An easy way to separate this report from others is to think of it as only counting "sales", which is why it is often used for tax purposes since sales tax is only based on the sales regardless of the payments made on the order.
Example: A $25 party takes place on February 1st, 2021. You receive a $5 deposit on January 1st 2021 for the party. The balance of $20 is paid on the party day, February 1st, 2021. You also received payment on January 1st 2021 for a $6 Laser Tag open play admission. The $6 Laser Tag admission will appear in both the Closeout Report and Accrual based reports for January 1st, as the sale and payment were on the same day.
The $5 party deposit will appear in the Jan 1st Closeout Report, but not appear on the Accrual based report for January 1st because it's associated with the start date of a party that has not yet taken place. Your February 1st, 2021 Accrual based report will reflect the total invoice amount of $25 for the event, whether or not they have paid for the order yet as it shows the sale was made.
Most often, the differences you will see between a cash and accrual report are new event deposits (liability). Please reference our Liability Analysis Report to get an accurate representation of these deposits. Click here for more information on the Liability Report: Liability Analysis Report
Sales Tax
Sales tax will never be represented in any cash-based report as cash-based reports track figures based on transactions, and sales tax isn't levied on transactions, it is levied on sales. This is actually the origin of accrual-based accounting, which is why accrual-based reports track figures using sales, so each item would be able to have sales tax calculated properly.
List of accrual-based reports: