24 Hour Trade and Aura
Some stores choose to stay open for 24 hours, and as a result, have to differ in operation to a store that follows standard business hours. For a store that doesn't close, tracking stock and sales can be tricky, and so Aura has several features to assist with this.
First, it's important to understand that normally reporting in Aura is very date-based. Most reports will ask you to specify a date range and draw results from midnight of the first date until midnight of the second in order to display all relevant information. Trading beyond midnight means that you have to specify in Aura the time at which reports must now run. To do this, please refer to the solution on Setting up 24-hour Reports in order to set up the store settings correctly.
Procedures:
| John has a store trading 24 hours, with three shifts of 8 hours each. He has set his Trade Until time to 04:00. He will trade until 04:00 the next day before the trading day clocks over.
This means that his Trading Day will overlap the calendar day by four hours. This means that sales processed on the 2nd of January from midnight until 4 AM will still show on the cashup of the 1st as it's part of that same trading day. |
NB: The most important thing to keep in mind when performing the full shop cashup is that no sales must be made between closing the day's cashup and until the Trade Until time has passed! Otherwise, those sales will reflect on the previous day's sales instead of the next. For this reason, we recommend keeping a Till open right up until the "Trade Until time", and posting the shop immediately after the time has passed. Aura relies on the cashups being done this way every time reliably.
Stock Taking
Again, as with cashups, it's important that stock takes are done at consistent times in order to get the most accurate reporting. On a typical 12-hour store setup, when posing your stocktake you select the date for your CLOSING stock, meaning that will be the final stock figure for that calendar date. This stock is then used as the opening stock for the NEXT day.
Standard Stocktake Options
Once the Settings are set to Use StockTake Times, you will be given a field to enter the time at which the stock take occurs. This is important as it means the store can enter the closing stock for the trading day at the correct time, which is likely to be near the close of the shift.
Use Stocktake Times Options
As of Aura 6.3.19.0, the Stock Variance report tracks sales between the Trade Until time instead of the calendar date. Therefore, the stocktake should always be performed at and captured for the Stock Take time. If the store is not on 6.3.19.0 or higher and wants to trade 24hours, request an upgrade from Development.