The RIGHT Way to Fix a Duplicate End of Day in LiquorPOS®

March 24, 2017 — Once in a while, you might find that you have somehow managed to create a duplicate (or more) End of Day in LiquorPOS.  Obviously, this needs to be corrected or it will inflate your sales numbers, your tax liability, and your costs.  As the inventory count is adjusted at the time of the sale and NOT when you run an End of Day, the duplicate will not affect your inventory count.

How does this happen?

There are a few ways a duplicate End of Day can happen.  LiquorPOS is a relational database system in which data is moved from one file to another in the process of closing the drawer and the end of day.  The data moves from the drawer file which is individual to the register, to the daily file which combines all the drawers when you run a close drawer and finally to the history files when you run an end of day.  If the process is interrupted at any point for whatever reason be it a printer problem, a corrupt data field (like when someone scans a barcode instead of entering the amount tendered) or someone remembering they didn’t count the change correctly, it is possible that a portion of the data will have made it to the next file but as the data is never flushed from the first file until it has successfully written to the next file.  The idea being that it is safer to risk duplicating data than losing it.  So the operator begins again, thereby creating a duplicate.

What can you do to prevent this?

The primary things you can do to prevent end of day issues are to:

1. Check that your printer has paper and is on line before you begin.  If you find you have recurring printer issues, you can go to Edit/Customize/Closeouts/Report and set the report to never print.  Then you can go reprint it once it has completed properly.
2. Do not interrupt the process unless LiquorPOS is giving you an option to cancel.
3. Make sure you run a Full Set Reindex regularly – at the very least when LiquorPOS prompts you to and preferably once a week.  The most common reason an end of day fails is that the big history file (which is skipped by the Routine Reindex to save time) has not been Reindexed and data can no longer be written to the file. The larger that file is, the more important doing a regular Full
   Set Reindex becomes.

How do I fix it?

Once you realize you have a duplicate end of day, you are going to want to get that taken care of.  Preferably before you need to file any tax or income reports.  These are the key things to remember:

1. Not matter how many times the day closed, the one to keep is the LAST one!! This is the one that completed so all the others have suspect data. ALWAYS keep the last one as it is the only one you can be sure wrote to all the files it needed to.
2. NEVER fix an end of day by editing the date to something in the past. This immediately looks like either theft or tax evasion to an auditor.
3. ALWAYS keep a record of a duplicate End of Day either by printing it out and saving it or at the very least recording the close out numbers of the edited end of days. When an End of Day is deleted or edited, the gap in the number sequence is an immediate red flag to an auditor and you will be glad if you can explain it clearly and easily.  The liquor store that is not audited by the Sales Tax folks is few and far between so maintaining an accurate audit trail will stand you in good stead at some point!

With those things in mind, there are two levels to which you can repair the duplicates:

1. You can do this piece yourself. Once you have identified a duplicate, from the LiquorPOS Main Menu, go to Activities, then to End-of-Day, the Edit a Previous Day.  Use the forward and back arrows to identify the duplicate (s).  Remember the last of the duplicates is the one you are going to leave intact as it is the one that completed. So the one with the highest Closeout number is the one you keep.  First, click on the Edit Totals button and edit each available field to zero. Enter confirms your entry in each field.  Click the check mark to save your changes.  Then click on the Edit Types button.  Again, edit all the fields to zero and use Enter to confirm each entry, click OK when you are done.  This will correct the majority of the impact of the duplicate.  However, you will notice that Cost is not a field available for editing in this screen.  In order for that to be corrected, further work needs to be done as described below.
2. To completely remove an End of Day you will need the assistance of LiquorPOS Technical Support – or me 🙂 !! Using database tools, the technician will need to delete the records associated with the duplicate closeout(s) from all three of the history files the End of Day writes to. Again, leaving only the records associated with the final one which completed.  Obviously, this leaves a gap in the closeout numbers which should be documented as I described earlier.

Has this happened in your system?

It is worth reviewing your end of day file to make sure this has not happened in your store before you file any tax reports or year-end reports as any duplicates will inflate your numbers.  To do so, you can scan the end of days by just going back one at a time in the Edit a Previous Day screen.  Duplicate sales totals will jump out at you.  The End of Days should appear in numerical order as well as date order.  Anything out of order needs an explanation.  You can also glance at the Reports/Closeouts/Reprint Reports screen where you can see if there are two End of Days for any given day – though you would still need to go to Edit a Previous Day to confirm duplicate totals.

Hope this is useful and don’t hesitate to reach out if I can answer any questions or help you!!