Filtering Transaction Reports

There are many filtering possibilities with the transaction reports.  The most common ones, Transaction Type and Category, are available as drop-down lists in the controls area (if the screen resolution is high enough for them to fit).  The others are available on the Filters dialog, accessed through the More Filters… button.  

Resetting the filters:  If you've loaded some other report or filtering and want to get back to the full list of transaction details, click on the Details Options... button ate the top of the Transactions tab view, and then click Reset the view to details / all transactions.

Drop-down List Filters

As with the Site Types filtering in other reports, when selecting a filter you are choosing to see only those records (transactions) of that type or category.  Note that if you see "-----------" in one of the drop-down lists, it means that a more complex filter has been defined from the filters dialog, which can't be shown in the drop-down list.  

For Categories, you can select a single category or "All Categories" from the drop-down list, or select any number of categories from the Filters dialog.  Keep in mind that Charge type transactions are about the only ones that will have your defined categories, since other types like Payments have their own "payment" category.  Thus if you select the "Propane" category, you will see the charges for propane, but not the taxes or payments that are probably associated with it.  (This is generally what you would want to see in any case.)

For Transaction Types, you can choose a single transaction type, All Transaction Types, or one of two special groupings from the drop-down list -- All Receipts or All Charges.  More specific filtering can be done through the Filters dialog.

Filter Dialog

From the Filters dialog, you can have additional filtering for Payment Methods, Discounts Used, and Operators.  Each of these is presented as a multiple-selection list box.  This means that you can select a single item in the list (click on it), or you can select any number of items at once (hold the Ctrl key down when you click on each item).  Note that you can also unselect an item with Ctrl-click also.  To disable filtering for a particular field, you can either select all of the items the list or unselect all items.  You can also use Reservation Filtering to select the sites or reservation types you want to include, which uses the Reservation Filtering dialog, and also filter customer and unbound transactions by what kind of balance exists for the customer or unbound-set.

Note: If you want to exclude all transactions associated with reservations (e.g. to see only unbound or customer-only transactions), you can do this by going to Site/Reservation filtering, then uncheck all 3 of the "Include if balance.." options.  Therefore it won't include any reservations regardless of balance, thus no reservation transactions will be included.  (There will be a warning just in case you do this by mistake.)

The flexibility of filtering any or all of these fields can be useful for customized reports, but you will need to be familiar with the way transactions are defined to avoid mistakes.  For instance, if you try to filter by the Cash payment method and the Good Sam discount, your report will be empty because payment methods only appear in Payment transactions and discounts only appear in Charge & Discount transactions -- so no transactions would meet both filter criteria.

Date filtering

You can also set the dates in the Filter dialog.  While the dates shown here initially are the same as the ones in the Tab view controls, you can also select one of the pre-defined date ranges like "Today", "MTD", "Last Year", etc.  These simply calculate the appropriate start and end date for the From and To date fields -- you will see the dates change as you click on the buttons.  However, they are especially important when memorizing reports.  If the date selection is set to anything other than Custom Dates, that selection will be saved with the memorized report -- so for instance you can define a report for Last Month, and it will always be for last month -- the dates won't have to be selected manually every time you load the report.

In addition to the date range, there's an option for whether to use the transaction Posting Date (usually desired for reports), or the Date Created (which can never change), or the Resv. First Night.  The "Date created" option should generally not be used for reporting, but can be used when searching for transactions entered on a certain day, for instance.  The "Resv First Night" option is also dangerous for reporting, but could be helpful when you want to see income generated for a certain group of reservations, regardless of when the charges were actually entered or the money actually received.  

Also note that if Posting Date is used, then there is an option to Include post-dated transactions.  This should normally be disabled, since you don't want post-dated transactions on the reports (e.g. prior to a reservation to being checked in).  However you can enable this if you want to see these "pending" transactions in a report for future days.  This also assumes that you're using the Post-dating option from Program Options / Transactions.  It does not consider transactions manually altered with future dates to be "post-dated" -- only those automatically post-dated by the system when the post-dating option is enabled.

Shift filtering

If you have Shifts functionality enabled, you may want to filter your report by the shift.  The Filters dialog contains fields to do this, but remember that the dates are also used for filtering -- so if you have a night shift that spans 2 dates, be sure to include both dates in the filter (or select All Dates).  You can select the Current Shift, Last Shift, All Shifts, or a Custom shift range and enter the shift numbers.

As with the date filters, the shift range type (Current, Last, etc.) will be saved with memorized reports.  This makes it easy to set up a memorized report for the Current or Last shift, or All shifts.

Text Filtering

Click this button to set up a text search so it only include transactions that have a data field matching certain text (handy for filtering by the "description" field).  Optionally it can deep-search to also look for a match in the related customer/reservation fields, e.g. to look for all transactions belonging to a unique customer name.  See Text Filtering for details.

Resetting the filter to see all transactions

The Reset Filtering button is a handy way to clear all of the lists, resetting to "no" filtering and back to "today".  If you don't want it to change the dates or shifts selected, use the Reset all but dates button.