Why Revenue by item and Revenue show different totals
image: in docs/help/_metadata.yaml Run Revenue by item for March and then run Revenue for March, and the two totals will almost certainly disagree. That is not a fault. They are answering different questions, off different dates, over different money, and a booking can easily land in one report's March and the other's April.
This article explains what each one actually counts, why the totals differ, and the one column that comes closest to a like-for-like comparison.
The short version
Revenue by item answers what sells. It reads the price you put on each booking, broken down by category and item, counted on the date the event happens.
Revenue answers what we billed. It reads issued invoices, counted on the date each invoice was issued.
Same business, two different lenses. One is the work you have sold; the other is the paperwork you have raised against it.
The three reasons the totals differ
1. They count on different dates.
Revenue by item counts a booking on its event date. A wedding on 14 March is March's, whenever you priced it and whenever you bill it.
Revenue counts an invoice on its issue date. If that same wedding is invoiced on 2 April, it is April's. Deposit-and-balance billing splits it further: the deposit might be January's and the balance April's, while the event itself stays firmly in March.
So a quiet month in one report can be a busy month in the other, and both are right.
2. They count different things.
Revenue by item includes every booking that has been priced, whether or not you have raised a single invoice for it. By default that means bookings at Tentative, Confirmed and Completed, which you can change on the criteria form.
Revenue only includes invoices you have actually issued. By default that means Sent and Paid; drafts have not been billed and voids have been cancelled, so neither counts.
A booking priced in the folio and not yet invoiced is fully present in Revenue by item and completely absent from Revenue.
3. They count different parts of the money.
Revenue by item is ex tax, lines only. It totals the net of each priced line and nothing else.
Revenue's total is the whole invoice: lines, service charge, tax, and gratuity.
This one catches people out most, because on a tax-inclusive account the prices you type already contain the tax. A $110 line is $100 of revenue and $10 of tax, and Revenue by item reports the $100.
How Revenue by item gets its number
It reads the event's folio, which is the pricing you build on the event's Pricing tab. Not quotes, not confirmations, not invoices.
For every booking whose event date falls in your range and whose status you have ticked, it takes each priced line and records the line's ex-tax net, its quantity, and the category (line group) it sits in. It then rolls those lines up twice, once by category and once by individual item, sorted biggest first, with each row's share of the total.
Three consequences worth knowing:
- A booking counts once, at its full priced value, no matter how much of it has been invoiced or paid. It is a sales figure, not a cash figure.
- A service charge and a gratuity never appear. Both sit on the document as a whole rather than on any line, so there is no item to attribute them to.
- An event with nothing priced does not appear at all. If the folio is empty there are no lines to count.
How Revenue gets its number
It reads issued invoices. Each row is one invoice, and its money splits into four parts that always add up:
Net + Service charge + Tax + Gratuity = Total
The Net column is the lines only, which is the same basis Revenue by item uses. The CSV calls this column Lines Net to be unambiguous. The Service charge and Gratuity columns only appear when something in the range actually carries one, so most accounts see a simpler table.
Paid is the money received against the invoice, and Outstanding is whatever is left of an issued invoice. An invoice you marked paid without recording a receipt still counts its full total as paid, so marking off a payment by hand does not make the total drop.
A worked example
A wedding on 14 March, priced on the folio, on a tax-inclusive account at 10%, with a 10% service charge:
| Folio line | Priced | Ex-tax net |
|---|---|---|
| Room hire | $2,200 | $2,000 |
| Catering, 80 covers at $110 | $8,800 | $8,000 |
| AV | $1,100 | $1,000 |
| Lines | $12,100 | $11,000 |
You invoice it on 2 April. The invoice comes to:
| Part | Amount |
|---|---|
| Lines net | $11,000 |
| Service charge (net) | $1,100 |
| Tax | $1,210 |
| Total | $13,310 |
Now run the reports:
- Revenue by item, March. $11,000, split Catering $8,000, Room hire $2,000, AV $1,000. The service charge is nowhere, because it is not a line. The tax is nowhere, because the figures are ex tax.
- Revenue, March. Nothing at all. The invoice was issued in April.
- Revenue, April. Total $13,310, of which Lines Net $11,000.
Three different numbers for one wedding, and every one of them correct for the question it answers.
The closest you can get to a like-for-like check
Compare Revenue by item's total against Revenue's Lines Net column. Both are ex-tax line nets, and both exclude service charge and gratuity, so they are the same shape of money.
They will still only match when every booking in your window was also invoiced inside that same window, with nothing part-billed and nothing left to raise. In practice that means a closed, fully invoiced period rather than the current month.
If the two are far apart and you expect them to be close, the usual explanations are, in order: invoices issued in a different month from the event, bookings priced but not yet invoiced, and a service charge inflating the invoice side.
What you cannot do yet
There is no report anywhere in 1pm that breaks invoiced money down by item. Revenue is per invoice and Tax summary is per rate; neither goes down to the line. So if you want "how much Catering did we actually bill in April", that figure does not currently exist as a report.
Revenue by item deliberately answers the booked version of that question instead. If the invoiced lens turns out to be what people want, the natural shape is a basis switch on the report itself, so you could run the same breakdown either way. Tell us if that is the report you are reaching for.
Where the other finance reports sit
The same two questions, when and what, place the rest of the finance suite:
- Payments received counts on the date the money landed, not the date you billed. This is your cash in.
- Deposits and balances counts on the event date, like Revenue by item, but reads signed confirmations rather than the folio. What is contracted, collected and still owed.
- Tax summary counts on the issue date, like Revenue, and covers the same invoices. Its net plus its tax equals its gross, and a service charge is counted at whatever rate it was charged at.
Related articles
- Reports lists every report and what each one is for.
- Pricing an event covers the folio that Revenue by item reads.
- Quotes and invoices covers raising the invoices that Revenue reads.
- Service charges and gratuities explains the two document-level amounts that sit outside your priced lines.
- Deposit and balance invoices covers billing one booking across two invoices, which is the most common reason an event's money spans two months.