I have been using a T-stats report in order to build our daily sales report. It's pretty simple, at-a-glance look at our daily changes and how we are tracking to goal. However, when reporting our actuals to our finance committee, our Finance department has what seems to be wildly different numbers from the Marketing DSR. I think it is because finance reporting breaks out sales tax, fees, etc, on individual lines, and T-stats lumps it all in together, but so far I can't prove that. Any idea where I can go to try and reconcile these numbers?
Hi Holly,
You're probably on the right track. T-Stats, if it's set to include all price categories, will lump them all together. So if your Finance office is reporting at, say, the GL level (with different price categories going to different GLs), it's normal that T-Stats will not line up with that. T-Stats also only reports on net activity, and many Finance reports show debits and credits. If you want to confirm that the ticket sales numbers in T-Stats in general reconcile to Tessitura, I recommend this recipe: https://community.tessituranetwork.com/topical_groups/tstats/w/tstats-wiki/434/matching-performance-sales-summary-by-pt-category-to-t-stats You can also compare to the Season Overview.
It is also possible to have configured T-Stats to exclude certain price categories, which would mean it may be intentionally omitting certain dollars. Especially if your Finance office may be looking at all revenue, or different categories broken out, you'll never have an apples to apples comparison. That said, T-Stats was not designed with financial reconciliation in mind, so depending on what type of reporting the committee is after, it may be that T-Stats isn't the best tool for this particular committee. It doesn't mean the numbers are wrong, they just may not be the numbers the committee wants to look at. The Ticket Sales by Period report that Jerry mentions might be better suited to what your Finance folks are after, but it too is not expected to line up with T-Stats, for several reasons detailed here. I don't have advice on what report you should use for your daily sales, but hopefully the above helps explain some of the differences in what you're seeing.
This is super helpful! I did a comparison for one randomly chosen day's sales between T-Stats, Ticket Sales by Period in Tess, and also Transactions by posting. The daily sales each pulled were very close together, +/- $150, and I'm guessing that is because of the time of day each pulls the numbers (our T-Stats updates at 5am, so the 24 hour cycle is off from Tessitura's). I'm going to build the reports you suggested and see how that nets out as well. Basically, I have to prove that Marketing and Finance are reporting the same numbers, we are just reporting gross vs. net. I think this will really help show that on paper. Thanks again!
Another thing to keep in mind is also that T-Stats only reports on order date, not transaction date. Both of the reports you mention do reference transactions. It's great that your numbers are very close, but for example, if your office received an order via mail on Monday, but the box office were closed, and when the box office reopened Tuesday they processed that mail order, if they enter the order dt as Monday because that's when the mail were stamped received by reception, then T-Stats is going to report on that order happening Monday. A report based on transaction date will reflect that order as happening Tuesday. So especially if you're reporting on sales that happen on a specific date, rather than through a specific date, that's another important distinction. I realize this example may not be something that would literally happen for your organization, but I hope it illustrates further why these aren't apples to apples comparisons. The recipes I mentioned are, and should match save for anything processed between the time the load finishes and when you run the report.