Prep the month-end sales export before close

It is the first business day of the month and close is looming. You pull the sales export from the POS and the marketplace, sum the revenue column, and the total is off by a suspicious amount. Then you notice the amounts are left-aligned — they came in as text. And the status column has "Completed," "complete," "COMPLETE," and "Done," which means your filter for finished sales is quietly missing rows.

Month-end is stressful enough without fighting the file. The recurring nature of the problem is the opening: build the cleanup once as a workflow and re-run it on next month's dump.

Why the totals lie

• Amounts stored as text, so spreadsheet sums skip them or concatenate.
• Inconsistent status labels, so "only completed sales" filters undercount.
• Refunds and voids mixed in with sales, inflating gross revenue.
• Duplicate order lines from a re-exported batch.

A close-ready workflow

1. Trim & Clean the amount and status columns to remove stray characters and spaces.
2. Type Convert amounts, taxes, and quantities from text to real numbers so totals add up.
3. Map Values to collapse every spelling of "Completed" into one canonical status, and "Refund"/"Void" into another.
4. Filter Rows to the statuses that belong in this month's revenue.
5. Dedupe on the order line key so a re-export does not double your sales.
6. Validate that every row has a date in the period and a numeric amount — outliers get set aside for review.

Reconcile from the receipt

The receipt gives you the numbers you can defend at close: how many sales rows passed, how many were rejected, and why. When the total finally ties out, you know it ties out because every amount is a real number and every status is consistent — not because a hidden cell happened to cooperate.

Save it as your "Month-end sales" workflow. Next month the dump lands, you re-run, and the reconciliation starts from clean numbers.