At Synder, we understand that every business has unique needs when it comes to data synchronization. That’s why we now offer multiple summary modes: aggregating data daily, monthly, per payout, or manually for custom periods.
While all modes consolidate your sales, fees, refunds, taxes, and discounts into a single record in your books, they differ in structure and timing. For this reason, if you ever need to switch between modes, it’s important to do so with care as changing the summary method mid-stream can affect how your data is recorded and reconciled.
In this guide, we’ll break down these methods to help you find the best fit for your business needs.
- Aggregating data daily
- Aggregating data per payout
- Aggregating data monthly
- Generating summaries for custom periods
- Changing summary period:
- Good to know
Aggregating data daily
Daily aggregation is an excellent option for businesses that want to get a quick, summarized view of all financial data for a day. This method prioritizes efficiency, making it ideal for fast-paced environments.
One of the key advantages of this method is that it lets you see your financial data in Synder and your books on a daily basis, allowing for immediate reconciliation. This convenience is particularly helpful if you reconcile within the first few days of the following month, as there is no need to wait weeks until all relevant payouts for the period are finalized.
Also, a lot of platforms generate daily summarized reports, which you can easily match up with Synder’s daily summaries. This makes verifying data and reconciling records across integrations much simpler.
Keep in mind that the summary for the current day will remain in either Fetching or Pending status until the next day. This way, Synder can capture all relevant data from the whole day.
Aggregating data per payout
Per payout aggregation is ideal if you prefer financial records that align with the payout (settlement) reports provided by your platforms. This method is particularly valuable for Amazon integration, as Amazon provides highly detailed settlement reports:
–The summarized view settlement report allows you to quickly compare total amounts with the aggregated summaries in Synder.
–The detailed view settlement report makes it easy to compare individual transactions in each payout with those in Synder’s aggregated summary, if necessary.
Besides Amazon, this summary aggregation method is also available for eBay and Shopify integrations, which provide settlement reports that you can easily compare with Synder’s aggregated summaries.
Just keep in mind that with per payout aggregation, summaries won’t appear until the payout is finalized, so it may take a few days or even weeks before they’re fully aggregated.
Aggregating data monthly
Monthly aggregation works well for businesses that prefer to reconcile their books on a monthly basis rather than daily. This method creates one comprehensive summary for each calendar month, providing a clean, organized view of your financial data.
Monthly aggregation is particularly beneficial if you want to match your accounting periods with your monthly business reporting cycles. This approach reduces the number of records in your books while still maintaining complete accuracy, making it easier to review and analyze your monthly performance.
The summary for the current month will remain in the “Fetching” or “Pending” status throughout the month, automatically finalizing on the first day of the following month. This ensures that all transactions for the entire month are captured in a single, complete summary entry.
This mode is available for all accounting integrations and works seamlessly with Synder’s auto-sync features, making sure your monthly summaries are synced as soon as they’re ready.
Generating summaries for custom periods
Sometimes your business needs more flexibility than standard daily, monthly, or per payout aggregations can provide. That’s where manual summary generation comes in, allowing you to create summaries for any custom date range that fits your specific reconciliation needs.
This method is best suited for businesses with unique accounting periods, those who need to reconcile specific date ranges for audits, or when you want to generate summaries for periods that don’t align with standard daily or monthly cycles.
You can create summaries for any period up to 31 days, and you can also stop the automatic creation of summary periods, giving you complete control over how your data is aggregated.
Unlike automatic summary modes, manually generated summaries won’t sync to your books automatically. They remain in “Ready to sync” status until you choose to sync them, allowing you to review and verify the data before it reaches your accounting system.
You can generate these custom summaries through the “Generate summary” option in your Summaries list, where you can select dates and preview the data before deciding to save it. This feature is available for all accounting integrations, making it a versatile solution for any business workflow.
Changing summary period:
When changing the modes, there are a few important things to keep in mind, as you have to be careful not to duplicate or miss data during the process.
The payout mode is a complex process of gathering transactions based on the payout they relate to. So you will not be able to generate payout summaries manually. Please feel free to reach out to support for help with generating per-payout summaries.
- Change the setting to a desired one (e.g., daily to monthly).
- All the summaries you currently see on the page in any status (including pending/fetching/etc) will be finalized in their original mode.
- The next period will be generated in the new mode and may cause duplicates or missing data:
Example 1 – missing data: If you switch from Daily to Monthly mode on May 20, the next scheduled summary will cover June. This means you’ll need to generate summaries manually for the remaining 10 days of May. Automatic summaries will resume starting in June.
Example 2 – duplicates: If you switch from Monthly to Daily mode on May 20, the existing monthly summary for May will remain finalized. Starting May 21, daily summaries will be generated for the rest of the month. As a result, data for May 21–31 will appear in both the monthly and daily summaries, causing duplication. To avoid duplicates, delete the monthly summary and manually generate summaries for May 1-20.
- The payout mode is a complex process of gathering transactions based on the payout they relate to. So you will not be able to generate payout summaries manually. Please feel free to reach out to support for help with generating per-payout summaries.
Good to know
If you’d like to double-check that each transaction is linked to only one summary, you can download the Register report. It shows how individual transactions are connected to specific summaries.
Here’s how:
1) Go to the Summaries menu tab -> Register
2) Download the report for the needed time frame (it will be sent to your email)
3) Check the “Summary ID” column in the report. Each transaction should be linked to a single summary. If a transaction has no Summary ID, it may be missing from the summaries. If it appears under multiple IDs, it may be duplicated.
- Two Summary IDs – This indicates a duplicate.
- One Summary ID – This is correct; each transaction should be linked to a single summary.
- No Summary ID – The transaction isn’t associated with any summary and isn’t recorded in the books.
You can delete summaries and generate new summaries to make sure the data is correct.
Now that you have a clear picture of all of the options, you can choose the synchronization method that best suits your business needs!
Reach out to Synder Team via online support chat, phone, or email with any questions you have – we’re always happy to help you!
