WooCommerce: Order Date Types
Video
Metorik lets you choose the date type to use for filtering in your store's date settings page. The options for this are currently:
Created
Paid
Completed
Why would you use one over the other? Well, that's completely up to you.
In WooCommerce, all orders have a created date, which is the moment that the order is made and stored in your system. Now, even if that order was never completed and paid for, it was still created, so you're able to filter based on when the order was created.
The paid date is when the order is marked as paid in WooCommerce. If an order was started by a customer at 11pm one evening, but something went wrong during the payment or they took a while to complete it, and only paid a couple hours later at 1am the next day, the paid date would be the following day.
The completed date is when the order is marked as completed. You may have a payment method or plugin that automatically marks orders as completed after a payment or certain action has been made, or you may manually set it as completed. When using this date filter, it will only be able to filter orders with a completed date, so you risk excluding orders that haven't been completed yet but should be included reports.
Now, why would you not always choose Paid? Well, WooCommerce doesn’t always mark an order as paid. For a number of reasons, like PayPal/Stripe not telling them about a payment, something temporarily breaking, or a payment method that doesn’t record it, it may not know that the order was 100% paid and should be considered as paid. If you were to filter orders by the paid date, those orders without a paid date (but that were actually paid for) would be excluded.
Keeping daily and month-to-date totals consistent
Reports place each order by the date type you've selected, so a total you recorded on one day can differ from a later month-to-date figure when orders are missing a date or gain a date later. Reconcile the difference with this checklist.
Confirm the date type you're filtering by. Metorik uses Created Date by default; if you changed it to Paid or Completed, orders without that date are excluded from reports.
Check whether orders are missing the date you're using. When you filter by Paid date, any order that was actually paid but has no paid date recorded is excluded, which lowers the total.
Narrow the comparison to a single day. Pick the day where the daily total and the month-to-date figure disagree, then look at the exact orders that make up that total in the Revenue Report.
Export and compare the orders. Export the Metorik orders and the corresponding WooCommerce orders, then contact support if the difference remains.
Changing the date type changes which orders a report includes. For the full list of reasons totals can differ and how to narrow a discrepancy, see Why don't the totals in WooCommerce reports match Metorik reports?.