I am a bookkeeper AND shop owner. I have ideas on how to make the financial reports more efficient. I am more than willing to consult on this if needed, just reach out to me.
1) A function to be able to retrieve only the information I need. For example, on the financial stats report, there's only about 10 lines of information I actually need to balance my books - but the system spits out about 80 lines of data. Each month, I have to copy/paste/edit all this data to make it work for me. If I could build the report I need, that'd be a lot faster and more efficient. So if all I need is "gross tax collected, gross refunds/discounts, gross tcg, gross amazon, out of state, and shipping collected" - I could get a report generated for just that info, and nothing else.
2) Expand the date retrieval tools. It's fine to have specific days, but add more functions here. "Last week" "Last month" "YTD" as examples. Right now, if I'm at the end of November, and I have to submit retail sales tax for October on a split screen with a bazzilion windows open- it's tedious to have to use the drop-down for month, and carefully select each day to simply select last month's data.
3) Transaction reports need to be easier to pull than from the orders page, and they need more specific info. A huge glaring example is that even from the orders page, I cannot get the specific totals per payment type on a spreadsheet - at all, because of split payment transactions and the system's inability to section them off. For example, I want to see all the individual credit card totals from all the transactions of a specific week. What I get, is every transaction that has a credit card transaction ON IT, and not those specific totals - so I end up spending precious time having to filter out split-payment transactions to alter those totals on my spreadsheet where I'm auditing my credit card batches for errors. This is a waste of time.
Instead, there should be a way to pull transactions separate from the order page, and onto a spreadsheet where the every payment type has its own column. Each transaction could have multiple payment types, but they'd be divided amongst the columns, making it a LOT easier to audit each payment type for errors. This would be SEPARATE from the orders page - please do not edit the way the order page functions. Those functions ARE helpful to the counter workers. They just suck for me, the bookkeeper/accountant.
4) More payment types. In another idea, I pitched more customizable payment methods, but at this point, I'd take anything. Gift cards is a good example of a payment method that should have its own button in the POS, and the ability to audit it separately. But also, Employer Receivable is something literally NO ONE talks about. That would be a special button that I would use only at payday to signify when employees close out their hold against their paycheck. Right now, I have to use the check button for that, which I'm also using for gift cards. I have to go fish those transactions out and separate them. The whole point here is that it would be a lot easier if I could make these decisions on how I want to set up payment methods MYSELF, and although I'm not programmer, it does seem like you have all the data points to do this if you add an additional structure to make this happen. Other examples are things like Apple Pay - where credit card terminals are now built to take that. Us bookkeepers like to audit payment methods separately, and all these payment methods that aren't covered in the POS make bookkeepers have to waste a lot of time filtering through it.
I will come back and edit this idea as I have more things, of which I know I have, but I have other things to do in this moment.
