Frequently Asked Questions
Direct answers to the questions asked most often across Qvian — registers and selling, tax and reporting, stock and costing, access and business units, and the apps.
The questions asked most often across Qvian, grouped by area. These are the cross-cutting ones — where the symptom shows up in one place and the cause lives in another. Questions specific to a single feature are answered in that feature's own troubleshooting section.
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Selling and the till
Why do I need an open register before I can sell?
Cause: Every sale belongs to a register session, and the session is what gets counted and reconciled at the end of the day.
Fix: Without a session there is nothing to attribute takings to and nothing to count against. Open the register with its cash float from the POS, or from Cash & Registers → Register Management. See Registers & Reconciliation.
Can a customer buy on credit at the till?
Cause: Credit sales need a customer record to owe against.
Fix: Yes, but the sale must have a customer attached — it cannot be a walk-in — and they must be within their credit limit and not blacklisted. Set limits from Collect Payment.
Why does a return not show as a negative sale?
Cause: A return reverses a specific earlier sale rather than being a sale with a minus sign.
Fix: Returns and exchanges raise credit notes with their own entries, and are excluded from daily reconciliation and tax aggregation. This keeps the original sale’s output tax and its reversal correctly paired. See Returns & Exchanges.
Tax and reporting
Why are my sales missing from my tax return?
Cause: Counter sales do not create tax records when they are rung up. They are created when the daily reconciliation for that day completes.
Fix: This is the single most common reporting problem in Qvian. Go to Cash & Registers → Daily Reconciliation and complete every day still showing as Pending in the period, then re-check Tax Statements.
When does money I have received become revenue?
Cause: Taking money and earning it are different events.
Fix: Money received in advance is a liability — Customer Deposits — until the service is delivered, at which point it becomes revenue. A busy booking period showing large deposits and modest revenue is correct, not a bug. See Accounting.
Why is a business customer showing as non-taxable on my GST return?
Cause: The customer’s tax ID is captured onto each sale as it happens. Adding it later does not reclassify sales already made.
Fix: Add the tax ID under Business Profile in Trading Partners, then use Refresh Supplier Info on the affected period in Accounting → Tax Statements.
Where are my zero-rated sales on the tax summary?
Cause: A zero-rated line produces no tax record — there is no tax to record.
Fix: They are reported through the Value @ 0% figure, aggregated from the line items themselves. If that is also empty, check the items were configured as zero-rated rather than having no tax code at all.
Why does my gross margin look impossibly high?
Cause: Cost of goods sold is not being captured.
Fix: Check that goods receipts are recorded against purchases and that products carry costs. Selling stock that was never received at a cost produces revenue with no matching cost. See Inventory.
Stock and costing
Why did stock not increase after a delivery arrived?
Cause: Creating a purchase order is not the same as receiving the goods.
Fix: Open the purchase in Expenses → Purchases and use Receive Goods. Creating records what you ordered; only receiving moves stock and books the cost. See Purchase Orders.
Why is a recipe cost wildly too high or nearly zero?
Cause: Almost always either the recipe yield or an ingredient’s conversion factor is wrong — typically out by a factor of a thousand.
Fix: Check the yield first — how many portions one batch makes. Then check the conversion factors on the expensive ingredients in Kitchen Stock. A 5kg product used in grams should read 5000.
Why does a dish show a suspiciously low food cost?
Cause: The recipe is part-costed — some ingredients carry no cost, so they contribute nothing to the calculation.
Fix: Look for the Part-costed flag. A part-costed item is effectively uncosted, not cheap. Fix the missing ingredient costs in Kitchen Stock, then re-check Food Cost Analysis.
Should I use a recount, a count fix, or a wastage entry?
Cause: They record different things, and the choice affects what you can learn later.
Fix: Record wastage when you know what happened to the stock. Use a recount when counting a whole area and you want variances reviewed together. Use a count fix only for a genuinely unexplained one-off. Correcting away a known loss hides how much you are losing and to what.
Why does ingredient stock keep rising even though we use it?
Cause: Recipes are not consuming it.
Fix: Check the menu item has a recipe linked, that the recipe lists the ingredient, and that the ingredient is linked to a purchased product. Any break in that chain means nothing is deducted. See Kitchen Stock.
Access, outlets and apps
Why can a colleague see a screen that I cannot?
Cause: Access needs two things: the permission on your role, AND the module enabled on the business unit you are in.
Fix: Check which business unit you are signed into first — that explains most cases. If the unit is right, ask an administrator to check your role in Settings → Roles and the unit’s modules in Settings → Business Units. See Roles & Permissions.
Why are sales or stock missing from a report?
Cause: Almost everything in Qvian is scoped to the current business unit.
Fix: Confirm which unit you are viewing using the selector in the top bar. Data from another unit will not appear, by design — each unit reports on its own trading. See Business Units.
Can one person work across several outlets?
Cause: Roles are assigned per business unit.
Fix: Yes. Give them a role in each unit they work in and they can switch between them. Their permissions can differ per unit — a manager in one, a cashier in another.
Do I need to install anything?
Cause: All three Qvian apps are web apps.
Fix: No. The main system runs in a browser. The staff app and the consumer app are progressive web apps — open the address and add to home screen. There is nothing to install from an app store.
Why does the staff app ask me to sign in separately?
Cause: The staff app keeps its own session.
Fix: Sign in with the same account. Being signed in on a computer does not carry over to the phone, and vice versa.
AI and automation
Can AI post to my accounts without me?
Cause: A fair thing to want certainty about.
Fix: No. AI prepares drafts — extracted invoice lines, proposed matches, generated recipes — and a person confirms them. The accounting is posted by the operational event that follows. See AI Features.
Should I accept an AI suggestion I am unsure about?
Cause: A confirmed wrong suggestion is worse than an unconfirmed one.
Fix: No. An unconfirmed suggestion is visibly a guess; a confirmed wrong one becomes a fact the system acts on. A plausible but incorrect recipe cost is far harder to spot than a missing one.
Why does Qvi report a figure that differs from a report?
Cause: Usually a different period, a different business unit, or a report that excludes something Qvi included.
Fix: Ask Qvi which period and business unit it used and what it counted, then compare against the report’s own filters. Returns and exchanges are a common source of difference. See Qvi.
Getting started and data
How do I bring existing data into Qvian?
Cause: Different data has different routes in.
Fix: Products, customers and suppliers come in through Data Migrations. An existing menu comes in through Menu Migration, which also builds the recipes behind it. Outstanding balances are set as opening balances on each trading partner at cut-over.
What should I set up first?
Cause: Some configuration is depended on by everything downstream.
Fix: Business units and their modules, then roles and people, then your product or menu catalogue with tax configured on every item. Tax is the one most often skipped and most expensive to fix later. See Getting Started.
What happens to my data if my subscription ends?
Cause: Access and retention are separate things.
Fix: Access stops at the end of the paid period; your data is retained rather than deleted. Export what you need before access ends. See Subscription & Billing.