Bravo Tips - Date Vs Business Date

Date vs Business Date

In Bravo, you might see dates referred to in two ways.

Date and Business Date

Is there any difference? Is it a big deal to use one and not the other? Will these differences affect my reports?

The answer is, yes. Business Date and Date are completely different.

In Bravo, Date is simply a calendar date. The calendar date changes is not changed or affected by anything in Bravo. Business Date, however, refers to the date the store opened and includes ALL ACTIVITY until the store is properly closed.

This means if you opened a store on August 1st, but then didn't close it correctly until August 12th, all activity in terms of loans, buys, sales and layaways will show as having occurred on August 1st. This will be the recorded business date for these transactions.

Take the Void View Transactions screen for example.

Notice that the Business Date is 08/30, however some of the transactions occurred on dates after 08/30. That is because there was no store closing on 8/30, so Bravo had no trigger to close out the business on that date. Transactions will continue to post to that business date regardless of the calendar date.

You can also see this when running an ad hoc under Void/View transactions.

Under Transaction Header you have both a Business Date and a Date to chose from. Results from an Ad Hoc report highlight just how confusing this can be.

Here you can see that even though a transaction occurred on the calendar date 06/26, the business date can be vastly different if the store has not closed.

But why?

Bravo uses the store closing to trigger shutting down business for the day. If your store closes, for example, and you have completed your books for the night, any business that comes in after those doors close (online for example) will go on the books for the next day, even if they happen before midnight on that same calendar date.

The reason for this is because the store has already closed, and the books are closed out.

Likewise, if you are having a Midnight Madness sale, and you open your doors at 10 pm and close at 2am, Bravo is looking at the opening time (10 pm) as the START of the business date, and the closing as the end. (2 am). So even if a transaction happened after midnight, because the store is still opened, Bravo still recognizes the same day of business.

What else can this affect?

Take a look at this loan.

This loan was created on 8/27/2018 at 15:09 by the associate Bravo. We have the original transaction screen and the receipt as proof. We can also reprint the ticket if we need to.

Let's attempt to locate it.

Starting with the End of Day Consolidated Report.

This report shows no activity for the date in question. Next the End of Day report:

There is no loan activity shown on the date in question.

Next is the End of Month report.

Once again no loan activity is shown for the date in question.

Maybe the Employee Performance Report will show it?

What is going on? We clearly have a large dollar value loan from the date 8/27.

The BUSINESS DATE however, was different.

In this case, the Business Date was 8/23, even though the customer was physically in the store on 8/27.

Now that we know the Business Date, we can run the other reports again and locate the loan.

So what reports are affected?

The answer is almost all of them.

Here is a partial list of reports that are driven by the Business Date rather than relying on the calendar date alone:

Employee Performance Report
End of Day Consolidated Report
End of Month Report
Safe Register Journal
Store Register Journal
Pawn Activity Summary
Sales Accounting
Sold Inventory

How can I stop this from causing problems?

The best practice is to always close your store, every single day. If you do not close your store, running accurate reports in Bravo will become difficult if not impossible. If you have not regularly closed your store, and you cannot locate transaction that you know should be there, try finding the Business Date and running the reports based on that.

If you haven't been closing your store, it is never too late to start and make this a habit. If you need help closing your store, see the following articles:

Remember - if you need assistance, you can reach out to us at 888-407-6287, option 3 for support. We are always happy to assist.