Shopify API get Total Returns/Refunds - shopify

Question

I am trying to get the Net Sales of orders of our Shopify store on daily basis. I can do it with the Orders API, but there seems to be a mismatch for the refunds returned by the API and the refunds/returns that show up in the dashboard.
In fact, the API doesnt show any refunds for the orders at all but there does seem to be some amount deducted from the Total Sales of Orders which make the actual Net Sales for that particular day.
I can retrieve the orders for one day by this example URL. I iterate through all the orders and add up each Order's amount which gives an exact number of Total Sales which match up to the number in the dashboard. But this Total Sales value doesnt take into account the refunds/returns.
/admin/api/2021-07/orders.json?status=any&created_at_min=2021-08-17T00:00:00-04:00&created_at_max=2021-08-18T00:00:00-04:00&limit=250
There is a refunds in the returned json for each order as well in the above call but that is empty for all the objects.
I have explicitly tried to retrieve the refunds as well by following API call but it also returns empty for all the orders.
/admin/api/2021-07/orders/{order_id}/refunds.json
You may have a look at the Dashboard Sales image for one day. Please note in this image, I can get the exact value for Total Orders from the API but can not retrieve a single refund/return for any of the order.
Would you be having an idea what are these Refunds/Returns shown in the Dashboard? If so, is there a way how can I accurately calculate the Refunds/Returns by the API as well, so I can accurately calculate the Total Sales for one day?

Answer 1

You should be working with Transactions. Specifically, the refund transactions. An Order has many transactions. So given some order, you can get at the interesting transactions, and calculate your important values, like Net. I have aced this for many clients, as Shopify does not report this type of value very well. So I generate reports with Net, refunds, taxes, etc, providing much clearer guidance than the standard Shopify reports.