The same month, three numbers
Many businesses have more than one view of monthly sales. Finance reads a figure from the ledger. The sales team reads a report from the order or invoicing system. Someone else maintains a spreadsheet for the board pack. Each is built for a reason, and each can be correct by its own rules while still showing a different total.
The difference matters when people start arguing about which number is right instead of what the number says. Before anything can be reconciled, it helps to know which questions to ask of each report.
Where the differences usually come from
Most gaps between sales totals come from a small set of definitions. Each one is easy to overlook because the reports rarely state it.
- Dates: one report counts the invoice date, another the order or dispatch date, and a third the date the transaction was posted.
- Period cut-off: late invoices or transactions posted after month-end can fall into different months in different systems.
- Credit notes and returns: some reports net them off against sales, others show them separately, and some leave them out.
- VAT: a total can be shown including or excluding VAT, and the label does not always say which.
- Filters: a report may exclude internal accounts, sample orders, cancelled lines or particular customers.
- Currency: sales in sterling or another currency may be converted at different rates or not converted at all.
- Manual adjustments: a spreadsheet may carry corrections that never went back into the source system.
Agree the definition before comparing totals
The useful first step is to write down what each report means by sales for the month. Which date does it use? Is VAT included? Are credit notes netted off? Which customers or lines are excluded? A short written definition often explains most of the gap before any data is touched.
Once the definitions are on paper, the business can decide which one the management report should use. That decision belongs to the people who use the report, usually finance and the managing director, not to whoever happens to build it.
Reconcile to the ledger, then explain the rest
For financial totals, the ledger is normally the reference point, because it is what the accounts are prepared from. A management report that uses the agreed definition should reconcile to the ledger where that applies, with any remaining difference listed and explained.
Operational figures such as quantities dispatched or orders taken are checked against the system they come from instead. Some differences will remain for good reasons, such as goods dispatched but not yet invoiced. Those are worth documenting so the same question does not come up every month.
Make it repeatable
Reconciling once by hand helps for one month. The lasting fix is to apply the same rules in the same order every month, so the agreed number is produced the same way each time and any new difference stands out.
The reporting demo on the KomodoWorks Work page shows this process on sample data: three exports that disagree, a written rule for each problem, and one agreed number at the end.