A very common question that comes to Retail Support is why sales and payments in Register closures don’t match. It is actually very normal for payments and sales to appear unmatched as they are showing us two different points about the information in a register closure.

Sales

In your register closure, sales is a number that shows the total value of all the sales created during the span of a register (from opening to closing.) Let’s say we've done three sales during a closure, for a total of $225.00.

This is money that will be paid to the store when all of these sales are closed. These sales will all have been created between the opening and closing time of the register closure but they do not represent how much money has been paid on the sales within this register closure period.

Payments

That's where payments come in! The payments section contains a sum of the total payments made against sales in this register closure period. These don’t have to be related to sales contained by the register. Let's say that one of the three sales in the above example was an on-account sale for $50 that will be paid at a later date. If this is the case, the total payments taken in the register closure report will read $175 - $50 less than the sales.

So, we can see that it’s possible for these to be different. It’s also possible for the payments to be higher. For example, a few days on from the register closure above, we might take in $100 in sales, $100 in new payments, and also a $50 payment for the on-account sale we started the other day. This would make the total payments amount $50 higher than the total sale amount.

When should they match?

While there are lots of cases where sales and payments shouldn’t match, there are a few instances where they should.

The main case in which sales and payments should match is when every sale made within the register closure period has also been paid off in this period AND that no other payments have come in.

If this is the case, and the sales and payments still don’t match, it’s good to go through the details of the register to check. Click View full details and compare payments against the sales made. You can check this against your totals, and get a better idea of where things might have gone awry.