Within our Toast to Accounting integrations, we offer a feature that provides detailed visibility into refunds within your journal entry, whether you are posting to Xero, Sage Intacct, MYOB Business, or any other accounting software connected to Toast through Omniboost.
By default, refunds are netted directly into your payment totals, so each payment method appears as a single, already-net figure, this is our standard behaviour. Your revenue figure is unaffected either way, since it's always based on Toast's net sales calculation and is independent of refunds regardless of this setting. For venues that want more granular insight into the refunds actually taking place, we offer the option to enable detailed refunds, which breaks refund activity out into its own lines against a dedicated contra account instead of folding it into the payment total.
How to enable it
Once toggled on within your Base onboarding, two additional fields will become available. The first is for selecting the ledger account designated for refunds, and the second is for selecting a tracking category (Xero), Department (Sage Intacct), or the equivalent dimension depending on your accounting software.
Please see the following image for reference:
How it works
When a refund is recorded in Toast, it now appears as its own line in the journal entry rather than being absorbed elsewhere. At minimum this adds two lines, and the exact number depends on how many refunds were processed and across how many payment methods, since each payment method generates its own line.
Refunds can't be posted directly against sales revenue. Toast's refund data is only available as a single amount tied to the payment it belongs to, with no breakdown by tax rate or revenue line, so there's no reliable way to trace a refund back to the specific VAT-rated sale it came from. Because of that, your revenue is sent as Toast's net sales figure, calculated from check totals and independent of refunds, while refunds are reconciled entirely on the payment side.
Each payment method is posted as a single gross line. Refunds are then posted as their own debit and credit pair: a credit against the relevant payment method account, reducing it down to what's actually expected to settle, and an offsetting debit to a contra account for refunds to keep the journal balanced. In the example below, this contra account is 812 - Refunds.
Example of an Xero journal entry with detailed refunds:
We hope this article has provided a clear overview of how detailed refunds work within our integration. If you have any further questions or feedback, please do not hesitate to reach out to your designated Omniboost agent or contact us directly at support@omniboost.io