Saving and scheduling reports

Aura has a lot of reports. Back Office → Reports now lets you keep the ones you actually use, and have them arrive by email without anyone remembering.

29.1 Saving a report

Set up a report the way you want it — the range, the location, how it's grouped — and save it with a name.

The important part: you save "last month", not "1–31 July". A saved report follows the calendar. Run it in September and it shows August; run it in January and it shows December. This is why saving a report is worth doing at all — a report frozen to the month you created it in would keep looking right and be wrong forever.

If you genuinely want a fixed range — a specific promotion period you keep coming back to — choose Custom and give the dates. That's frozen on purpose, and it says so.

Ranges run on South African time, so "yesterday" means your trading day. A venue closing at 02:00 gets those two hours counted on the right day.

In-progress ranges stop at right now. "This month" on the 3rd covers three days, not thirty-one — so the averages mean something.

29.2 Having it emailed

Add a schedule: daily, weekly or monthly, what time, and who gets it. It arrives as a CSV you can open in a spreadsheet.

Two things worth knowing:

The report's range comes from the report, not the schedule. A report saved as "last month" and scheduled daily will email last month's figures every morning. That's what you asked for — if you want daily figures, change the report's range to "yesterday". Aura won't quietly change what you saved.
A monthly schedule can only be set up to the 28th. Anything later would skip February entirely, which looks like a fault rather than a choice.

It can't send twice. However many times the check runs — a restart, a retry, someone pressing the button — each report goes out once per period. So you'll never get Monday's report three times.

29.3 Knowing it arrived

Deliveries lists what went out, when, to whom, and how many rows. You'll see one of:

Sent — done.
Nothing to report — the schedule ran and the report was empty. Deliberately not emailed: an empty spreadsheet every Monday trains people to ignore the email. But you can see it ran.
Not set up — email isn't configured on your account yet. Nothing was sent, and it says so rather than pretending.
Failed — with the reason.

29.4 Labour cost against sales

Reports → Labour puts what you paid staff next to what you took, for any range.

It shows the total, the percentage of sales, revenue per paid hour, and a read on the number — Tight, Healthy, Heavy or Overstaffed for the trade. Each staff member is listed with their hours and cost, highest first, which is where a rostering problem shows.

Rates are locked to the shift. Someone's pay rise doesn't change last month's labour report. "Labour was 28% in May" stays 28% in May.
An overnight shift is split across the two days it spans, not counted twice — otherwise a Friday-night shift would double your weekend labour.
People still clocked on are counted up to right now, so the figure is usable mid-service when you're deciding whether to send someone home.
Breaks come off, split proportionally if the shift crosses midnight.

29.5 Sales by brand, supplier or category

Reports → By dimension groups sales by brand, supplier or category — revenue, cost, margin and margin percent, biggest first.

The supplier view is the one to take into a price negotiation: it's the only place that tells you what a supplier's products actually earn you.

Products with no brand or supplier recorded appear as "Not recorded" rather than being left out. That's on purpose — leaving them out would make the report disagree with your sales figures, and that group is exactly the list of products someone needs to go and fill in. Click into it to see which ones.

29.6 Opening a total

Every row can be opened to show the individual sales behind it — the transaction number, the date, the product, the amount. A total you can't open is a total you can't check.