Receipts by Category report changing previous values

The Receipts by Category report is a "calculated" report rather than just summarizing raw transactions, so it's particularly sensitive to the way data is entered, and especially to changes made to the data.  This is one reason it's important to do everything you can to keep from altering "prior" transactions.  For one thing, make sure most operators log in with an access level of Reservations, not Administrator, so they can't alter old transactions.

The report is mainly sensitive to the order of transactions, particularly the position of the Payments vs. the Charges.  If you manually allocate categories for a payment then that can affect any following payments also, e.g. if a later payment does not have manual allocations then it will try to "fix" the allocations to make them add up correctly.  This kind of thing has already been covered in the normal documentation under Dynamic Interactive Report Screens / Transactions / Receipts by Category, so you should first read that if you have any questions about the "normal" operation of this report.

So what if you print the report once, and then later notice that values have changed for the same date periods you printed earlier?

The categories for a given Payment cannot be affected by a transaction that's below it in the history for that reservation or customer, so if amounts in the reports are changing on previous dates, that could be a result of one of these things:

- Transactions being deleted (or values changed)

- Transactions being moved up or down through a reservation's Transaction History

- Category allocations manually changed in previous payments

- Transaction Categories deleted from the Pick List

Outside of operator intervention, there are a couple other possibilities:

- Bad links or orphaned transactions -- go to Maintenance / Database Maintenance, and do each of the "Report and repair" functions to fix orphans and Repair bad links.

- Network synchronization issues -- see if the report differs on separate computers.  This usually results from orphaned transactions.   Make sure the Master computer is all fixed up using the steps above, then on each of the other computers do a Maintenance / Network Functions / Request a full database refresh (one at a time, giving it time to complete before doing the next one).  

Finally, if you upgraded the program since you ran the prior reports, then the new reports may be different due to fixes in the report calculations.