What the Numbers Mean
Two panels can disagree about how much money you took last week and both be right. They may count different things, or put the same thing on different days. The names are precise on purpose.
The two dates
Most differences between reports come back to the date used.
A booking has two dates that matter: the day it was sold, and the day the customer turns up. For an escape room, they can be months apart. A booking taken in March for a July game belongs in March if you are asking "what did we sell?", and in July if you are asking "what did we run?".
Buzzshot uses both dates. This rule covers the panels you add from the gallery and the metric names in the panel editor:
- A bare name is counted on the day of the visit. Bookings, People, Booking Value, Unpaid.
- The Made and Booked twins are counted on the day of the sale. Bookings Made, People Booked.
- Order Value is counted on the day the order was placed.
- Net Payments and the rest of the money-received figures are counted on the day the money moved.
Most ready-made panels carry a note saying which date they use. When you build a panel yourself you choose, with the Date field control: Visit Date, Date Booked or Order Date. See Building a Panel from Scratch.
Money you received
These figures come from the record of money that moved. They cover imported history, manual refunds and cash booked straight in, as well as card payments.
- Payments Received. Money taken, before any refunds. Excludes gift cards.
- Refunds. Money paid back. Excludes gift-card refunds.
- Net Payments. Payments Received less Refunds. This answers "did we take any money?".
- Gift Card Payments. Gift-card payments received, less gift-card refunds.
Payments by Method splits the same figures by how the customer paid. An Other row covers money with no payment record behind it: imported history, manual refunds, cash booked directly.
What you sold
These figures come from the bookings and orders. They count the full price, whether or not anyone has paid it.
- Order Value. The total price of orders placed, paid or not, including all tax. Dated by the order.
- Booking Value. The total price of bookings taking place, including their share of any discount, fee or tax charged across the whole order. Dated by the visit.
- Unpaid. What is still owed on bookings taking place, after everything paid so far. Never negative: an overpaid booking counts as zero rather than pulling the total down.
- Amount Paid. Payments taken against those bookings, gift cards included, before refunds.
- Orders. How many orders were placed.
- Average Order Value. Order Value divided by the number of orders.
Amount Paid and Net Payments are the pair people confuse most often. Amount Paid is attached to bookings, counts gift cards and ignores refunds. Net Payments is attached to the money, excludes gift cards and nets refunds off.
Gift cards
A gift card affects your records when it is sold and when it is spent, so it needs three separate figures.
- Gift Cards Sold. The value of gift cards bought. This is money coming in.
- Gift Card Payments. Gift cards being spent on a booking. Not new money. You are settling a debt you took on when you sold the card.
- Gift Card Float. Cards sold that nobody has spent yet. Money you are holding against visits still to come.
Booking Value excl. Gift Cards answers "how much did I sell that did not come out of a gift card?". See Gift Cards.
Tax, discounts and fees
- Tax. Tax charged, whether it was added on top of the price or was already inside it.
- Discounts. Money taken off the price: coupons, manual discounts and automatic rules.
- Fees. Charges added to the price: booking fees, card surcharges, fees attached to custom fields.
- Order Value ex Tax and Booking Value ex Tax remove both kinds of tax, so they give the right figure whether your prices include tax or add it at checkout.
See Taxes and Fees and Coupons for where these come from.
How many
- Bookings. How many bookings took place in the period.
- People. How many participants were on them.
- Bookings Made and People Booked. The same rows counted on the day they were sold.
- Average Party Size. People divided by bookings. Per booking, not per slot, so two bookings sharing a slot count as two.
How full you were
These figures come from your time slots, not your bookings.
- Seats Taken. Places booked on these slots.
- Seats Offered. Places still for sale: what was left after the bookings, not the capacity you started with.
- Total Capacity. Every place on these slots, booked or not. This is Seats Taken plus Seats Offered, and it is the one to divide by if you want the share of seats you filled.
- Occupancy. How much of a slot's capacity sold, worked out for each slot and then averaged. It counts bookings, not people. Most escape rooms take one booking per slot, so in practice Occupancy tells you what share of your slots went out rather than how many seats you filled. A quiet Tuesday morning counts for as much as a full Saturday night.
- Slots. How many slots ran, blocked ones included.
- Blocked Slots. How many you took off sale.
Blocked slots are left out of Occupancy. Taking a room off sale for maintenance does not reduce your occupancy. This is intentional, though it may be unexpected. See Time Slots.
Rates
- Refund Rate. Refunds as a share of money received.
- Discount Rate. Discounts as a share of booking value.
Both divide one total by another, rather than averaging a ratio worked out per order. A single large refund therefore affects the figure according to its size, not its count. Occupancy does the opposite because every slot has equal weight, whether it holds two people or ten.
Why these two do not match
| You compared | What happened |
|---|---|
| Net Payments against Booking Value | One is cash that moved this period, the other is the value of visits this period. A deposit taken in May for a visit in August sits in different periods on each. |
| Net Payments against Amount Paid | Amount Paid includes gift cards and ignores refunds. |
| Bookings against Bookings Made | One counts visits in the period, the other sales in the period. |
| Unpaid against your day's takings | Unpaid is dated by the visit, so it will not reconcile against money that moved today. |
| Order Value against Booking Value | Orders are dated by the sale and include non-booking products. Bookings are dated by the visit. |
| Occupancy looks too high | Blocked slots are excluded. If half your rooms were off sale, the half that ran is all you are measuring. |
| A total does not match its rows | A grid's summary row and total column work on the cells, not on the bookings underneath. The Occupancy grid averages them, because adding percentages is meaningless; the People grid adds them up. |
Building panels with these
Most names on this page appear in the panel editor's Metric dropdown with their definition. Choose one and Buzzshot applies the full calculation.
Bookings Made and People Booked are the exception. They are panel names rather than dropdown entries, because they are not different sums: pick Bookings or People and set the Date field to Date Booked, and you have built them yourself.
