Mismatched Inventory to Payment Transactions:
This line item represents orders, where the total price of the inventory on the order does not equal the total of the credit card payment transactions collected.
In other words, Stripe cannot fully track the funds collected for the order, so this line item in the accounting report highlights the orders you should review.
This line item does not necessarily mean money is missing.
It can mean someone is paying for an order with a check, cash, or wire transfer. It can mean a discount was not applied properly. It can mean a customer was refunded but the products are still on the order and haven't been returned to inventory for resale.
Here are some situations where the Mismatched Inventory to Payment Transactions line item is populated with an amount. The amounts are related to the price of the wines, not shipping or taxes.
1 - Orders processed as “Not Paid”: When you process an order as an admin user, via the “Offline/Pay Later” feature on the final checkout page, you are applying inventory to an order, yet receiving no funds via a credit card transaction at the moment of processing. That is a "mismatch" because Offset assumes inventory is being removed from stock, applied to an order, and sent to the customer, yet no funds are being received to pay for that inventory in which Stripe can track via a credit card charge.
It does not mean those dollars are "missing". It is more-so a heads up to remind your team that this order will not have a confirmation of funds deposited by Stripe into the winery bank account, because no credit card transaction took place. You need to manually confirm via your bank statements that someone on your team actually deposited the check or cash for that order. Or that the wire transfer was received.
In other words, Stripe and the Offset platform have no way of knowing when funds for those orders were deposited into your bank account. Therefore, in this scenario, the Mismatched Inventory to Payment Transactions line item is a reminder your team to do some research on that order and make sure the funds were deposited.
A subset of processing an order as “Not Paid”, if you apply Credits and decrease the total amount of the order to $0, that amount of Credits will contribute to the Mismatched line item. This is a rare occurrence, yet Offset did have a client years ago that was using an internal customer account to remove/track the stock of all bottles opened in their tasting room. They would add credits to this internal account, process a Not Paid order, and apply those credits. That process contributed to the Mismatched line item.
2 - Existing orders have a partial or full refund processed, but the inventory stays on the order: That is a mismatch where a direct refund is processed on an order but the product is not removed. The Offset platform assumes the customer still received the wines because the inventory remains on the order...again, a mismatch of inventory to payments collected via credit card transaction.
If either of these scenarios occur during the time span you are searching in the Accounting reports, this line item will populate with the corresponding financial amounts.
Be aware that the total number you are seeing in this line item could represent multiple orders and therefore one or both of the situations listed above.
As a reminder, this line item only produces financial totals for products. It does not account for sales tax or shipping charges on the orders.
**Very Important**—Lastly, this line item is partially dynamic. One of its features is to track orders you process without a credit card, meaning you aim to receive payment for the wines via check, cash, or wire transfer.
With that, if you process an order as Not Paid, and then collect cash, check, or wire transfer for the order and mark it as Paid, the same amount will remain in this line of the accounting report. It is just continually tracking the amount of dollars you received via check, cash, or wire transfer throughout the date range selected.
Therefore, it should not be treated like it is an accounts receivable payment tracking system, where the dollars decrease as you receive cash, check, or wire transfer payments.
However, if you receive payment for that "Not Paid" order via a credit card transaction at a later date, yet both the original order date and the credit card transaction date are within the same date range you are searching, it will remove that order's total from the Mismatched line item. The two transaction dates cancel each other out. If the date range you are searching only includes one of those transactions (the original order date or the credit card transaction) you will see an entry for the dollar amount.
With all of this, to help yourself for later, as it is difficult to remember and track down these orders at the end of the week, month, quarter, and/or year, it is wise to develop a tagging process for orders that are processed as “Not Paid”. Or if you process a refund but the wine/product/SKU quantity stays on the order, create a Tag referencing that moment, so you can research it later. Your accounting team will thank you when they are in the midst of reporting season.