While Standard Reports are built for tracking sales trends and goals, Accounting Reports are built for banking reconciliation and should be the report your accountant uses.
Accounting Reports run on a 24-hour block from 5pm to 5pm PDT (4pm to 4pm PST), not midnight to midnight. This is because Stripe is a global payments company that settles on UTC time, and 5pm PDT / 4pm PST is equivalent to 12am UTC.
Why Your Accountant Should Use This Report
Accounting Reports are the ones built for bookkeeping, while other reports are built for planning or goal-tracking. Two reasons this matters:
Standard Reports are not static. If an order is placed in January and is later canceled in February, the January Sales report retroactively drops that order's dollars. The month it was originally reported in no longer reflects what was true at the time. That's fine for tracking trends, but it means the numbers can shift after your books are already closed for that period.
Accounting Reports use the transaction date and Stripe's settlement window, not the order date. This is what lets the totals reconcile against what Stripe actually processed and what lands in the bank.
NOTE: If your accountant says "the numbers don't match last month," check whether they're pulling from Standard Reports instead of Accounting Reports first. That's the most common cause. See Differences in Sales Data Showing on Different Reports for more on how the two can diverge.
Selecting a Channel
Accounting Reports > Sales By Channel opens with an option to view All orders, or to isolate based on Order Channel. The defaults are Web/Allocation, Admin, Club, and POS, plus any custom channels created on the Configurations page.
Each channel shows a number in parentheses next to it, which is the count of orders processed in that channel for the selected time frame.
What This Report Shows
Once a channel and date range are selected, the report compiles the following, in order:
Product line items — each product sold or refunded, quantity, average price, and total, followed by a Subtotal.
Sales tax by state — based on the rates entered on Setup Your Shipping & Tax Settings by State. You may see "Variable % by address" instead of a set rate if you use ShipCompliant for tax rates.
Shipping totals — all shipping dollars collected in the time frame.
Discounts — any discounts applied to orders in the time frame.
Mismatched Inventory to Payment Transactions — orders processed as Offline / Pay Later, plus refunds issued without removing inventory from the order. See Mismatched Inventory to Payment Transactions and Accepting Offline Payments: Pay Later, Cash, Check & Wire for the full mechanics.
Customer Credit — orders that used funds credited to a customer account. See Credits Overview for more details.
Tips — if tips are enabled, this shows tips received.
Regional Fees — regional fees such as Colorado Retail Fee and California Redemption Value.
Processing fees — fees paid for the processing of the order.
Total — the final amount collected during the selected timeframe.
Exporting the Report
The Actions box on the right lets you download a spreadsheet of everything shown on screen (Export Report), or a transaction-level breakdown (Credit Transactions export).
Situations to Be Aware Of
Situation A: You sell 24 bottles of one wine in a month and refund an order for 6 of those bottles in that same month. The report will show 18 bottles sold for the month.
Situation B: You sell 24 bottles of one wine to one customer in January. That order is fully refunded in February, and no other orders for that wine come in during February. February will show -24 bottles and negative dollars for that product since you paid the customer back and no other sale offset it that month.
The same logic applies to sales tax. If an order is placed in January and refunded in February, and it was the only order shipping to that state that month, the February sales tax line for that state will show as negative.