The total sales report is in fact a range of reports that provide detail about gross sales in a period of your choosing. The primary screen is shown below.

The date range you wish to use for the report is set using the start and end date selectors at the top of the screen. Because the length of the report is unaffected by the size of the date range you can safely select as broad or as narrow a range as you wish. Naturally, the larger the date range the longer the report will take to build but even periods of over a year should only take a few seconds.

Next you will need to select the type of report from the list on the left – Category, Product, Sale Item or Reporting Group. Doing so will generate a list of the corresponding entries on the right hand side. You can then select the items that you want to report on either by clicking them individually, searching for them using the filter box at the top to type the first few letters or select all relevant options by clicking the Select All option at the top right.

There are some additional options for these reports which may be useful. By default the reports give an overall figure for gross sales of the selected items in the period but it is possible to have the figures broken down in one of 3 ways – per till, per till group or by payment method. By default lines where no sales have been recorded in the selected period are blank but you can also select to see these zero values. Finally there’s the option to include in the selectable list items which have been deleted. This is particularly relevant when reviewing historic sales reports. Once you’ve made your selections just click ‘Generate Report’.

The reports for Category, Sale Item and Reporting Group all generate similar headings with Number of items sold, Total Revenue and Average Revenue. The Sale Item option has sub-headings by category.

The Product report is different in that is is focused more on the overall quantity of each product sold rather than the number of separate items and is intended more as a stock type of report. It therefore has a figure for the amount of product sold in the period expressed in terms of the smallest measure, the stock take measure(s) and the main sale unit. For many products two or even all three of these would be the same, but for key stock lines such as draught beers, wines and spirits they’re usually very different.