Fix a sale without losing it

Mistakes are part of the job

Anyone who records sales by hand will record some of them wrong. You type 45 when the tag said 54. You record the tax as part of the price. You record a sale for the oak washstand, and on Saturday the buyer messages to say they can’t come after all.

None of this is unusual. What matters is what happens next: whether the mistake is easy to fix, and whether everything that counted it is fixed too.

Correct a sale

When a sale’s details are wrong, correct them so the sale reflects what actually happened: the date, the amount the customer paid, the tax, fees or the note. (Purchases and expenses can’t be corrected from their own page yet; a correction there is offered when a change needs reviewing. You can void a purchase or an expense from its own page, the same way as a sale.)

Every total that included that sale follows the correction. Sales, What customers paid and Sales tax collected, for today and this week, all count the corrected record, not the first version of it. There’s no second place to update and no running total to adjust by hand.

That is the difference from a notebook or a spreadsheet. In a notebook you cross out and rewrite, and the weekly sum you already added up is now wrong. In a spreadsheet, the cell changes but the copy you pasted into last week’s summary doesn’t. In Sellers Almanac the totals are always worked out from the records themselves.

Void a sale

Some sales shouldn’t count at all. The buyer didn’t show. You recorded the same sale twice. A deal at the booth was agreed and then called off before money changed hands.

For those, void the sale. A voided sale stays in your history, marked Voided, and stops counting toward your totals. Nothing disappears, and the totals follow, just as they do for a correction.

Voiding is not a refund

It’s worth being precise here, because the two are easy to confuse.

A void says the sale shouldn’t have been counted. A refund is a separate event: the sale happened, and later you gave money back. Treating a refund as a void would rewrite history and make the original sale disappear.

Refunds can’t be recorded yet, so no refunds are subtracted from your totals. If you’ve given a customer money back, the honest thing for now is to leave the original sale as it was and add a note to it saying what happened and when. That keeps the fact on the record until refunds can be recorded properly, which is planned for a later phase.

When changes clash

Corrections can come from more than one place. You might fix a sale on one phone while the same sale is changed on another. When two changes to the same record clash, the clash waits in Needs attention and nothing is overwritten until you review it and choose. For money, silently overwriting one version with another is the kind of error nobody notices until it’s expensive.

Working with honest totals

Corrections and honest totals work together. If you recorded a sale without its tax amount, the totals that depend on it say “at least” and are marked Incomplete until you finish it. Adding the missing amount is a correction like any other; the totals become complete, and the record leaves Needs attention.

Where it stands

Correcting and voiding sales is in founder testing on iPhone, in a test build the founders use. Sellers Almanac isn’t available to download yet. The roadmap shows what’s built and what’s planned, including refunds.