Mentoring Using Readysell Lists, Reports & Displays To Drive Your Business

Overview

The tips below are intended to inform you about the reporting options available through Readysell. There are separate user and training guides covering the details around each area of reporting.

This guide is intended to point you in the right direction towards getting more information from your Readysell's screens and reports.

Basics

You need to make sure someone on your team understands all the following basic reporting concepts:

Report output is controlled by filters, where you specify the way each report limits information produced and parameters that ask you to fill in the fields required.
Readysell has several kinds of reports. Including Form reports, List reports and Analysis reports.
There are several ways to use those reports including email batches, scheduling, SMS and exporting results.

Some sales reports use "Cubed" data. That is data summarised and saved overnight. If you use a sales report using this data, you have to check that the "Refresh Cubes" task is turned on for the particular "Cube" used by your report. Reports based on cubes normally have the word " by " in the report name. Like "Sales By Customer By Product"

Procedures

Write up a reporting procedure, including reports you only run occasionally. For example, you can setup a schedule to regularly run reports that identify. Make sure there is a routine put in place so that the right reports are run at the right time and sent to the right people. To help you get started setting up your report procedure. You can use the following form: Procedure for taking action using a report

Objective

Look for opportunities to use colours and view variants instead of reports where possible. To inform your team instead of using reports where possible.

Implement a daily, weekly, monthly reporting plan in your business.

Once you know what reports can do.

What kinds of reports might I consider using in my business?

As with all Readysell user guide pages. You can use the ellipsis "..." button at the top right of this page to export it to PDF or Word for review and editing

Report Source	Options	Output	Benefits	Weaknesses	Exersize	What's next	Comments
Alerts		SMS messages, emails, to do list	Electronic messages that prompt your team, your customers and/or your suppliers when exceptions occur	High level of expertise required to set them up initially if you try to do it yourself. Setting up too many alerts might cost a lot via sending many SMS messages or may flood staff/customers with too many messages. Could become an annoyance rather than a benefit.	If your business involves education sales. Setup SMS messaging for your back to school sales.	How to set up Automatic SMS for Invoices /wiki/spaces/INT/pages/1634533432 Setting up automatic accounts receivable follow-up email and SMS notifications	Mainly used in respect to education sales to inform schools/parents when school packs are ready to be picked up. Used by some sites, but still underutilized.
Analysis reports		Visual cross tab in two dimensions across the screen, such as customer sales with each month showing in a column next to the customer	Very easy to drag and drop columns to get different levels of consolidation and to drill into your data.	Moderate level of expertise required to first setup the report. It can be slow to run an analysis report for a long period of time using detailed data. Totaling GP% requires using a custom total and is very slow, try not to use that option on line by line reports.	Create an analysis on invoice lines to allow you to drill into sales trends by year, hour, month, week, day, customer, sales person and category	Creating a new analysis report Key Analysis Reports Overview Standard Analysis Reports Set Creating a new analysis report	We believe analysis reports are underused and want to help more sites start using analysis reports.
Custom fields, add the field you want then report on it		New fields that can be used to tag your customers, products etc. with any data you need for your business.	Capture information not normally recorded in Readysell, then report on it. Things like which customers get printed catalogues	A little procedure needs to be understood in order to create your own custom fields.	Add a custom field to specify which customers get printed catalogues and then later print address labels for those customers from form reports	Custom fields	Handy for filtering lists views as well as filtering reports. You can make a list report to print the value on the custom field as well if you want to output the custom field value. Rather than just use the custom field to limit the information printed/displayed.
Form Reports	Show in reports Send to reports Executable reports	Printed and emailed reports for your customers and suppliers. Including all the graphics and fonts required to make your business reports look good to external parties.	Meet your presentation quality reporting requirements. Easy to run. Power users can make their own labels and other reports.	Very high level of skill required to edit or create new form reports. But the report writer is available to you. There is a slight chance that form reports you make yourself may fail due to future Readysell upgrades.	Print address labels for customers that get printed catalogues. Check the labels in Readysell form reports and consider if there are any product shelf, price, customer, delivery or other labels you might start using in your business.	Form Reports Key Form Reports Overview Creating a new form report	Our support team is making new form reports for our customers regularly. Put in a ticket, look at the Readysell store, ask the user group, or phone Readysell support if you want a new form report.
Scheduling Reports		All types of Readysell reports can be scheduled. Some reports are setup to run from list views, not from the report list. Only "Executable" reports can be scheduled. Reports that automatically run on a scheduled basis can send an email or save to a folder.	Provides the benefits of a report without the user having to know how to run it. Makes it easier to ensure a report is run on a regular basis. The effort involved with planning which reports you should lookat can itself be a big benefit. It forces you to think about areas that can benefit from reports.	It can take some effort learn how to setup report schedules. You need to stop some scheduled reports once they are no longer required or they can become an annoyance.	Try scheduling the customer spend variance report for your sales team. As per the instructions in the column to the right.	Scheduling a report to run automatically on a period basis	We believe our report scheduling feature is under used. We want to help more of our customers use this feature. Please let us know if you have a report you want to schedule.
Email templates		Customers receive emails with links to the messages you want them to consider along with the information they are interested in such as statements and invoices.	Great marketing benefits integrated right into the everyday emails that have your customers attention. An opportunity often missed by dealers.	Medium level of skills required to change email templates	Add an image to your standard email template and add a link to your website to the image	Turning your emails into marketing tools Sending an accounts receivable follow up using an email batch Readysell Tips and Tricks Training	You should be using the accounts receivable follow up email. Everyone that uses this finds that their customer days payable on outstanding balances reduces.
Lists and list reports	List reports are live windows to your data that are particularly well suited to drilling into operational issues Subtotals, totals, groups colours Export to excel Conditional formatting Filters	Eliminates the need to run reports as your team are visually cued in on the information they need to know.	The single most effective way to get information to your team. Very accessible way to inform your team about key information during the normal course of business.	Requires discipline to maintain a central master user to record and deploy the standard views for your business.	Find out which sales are loosing you money and what you can do about it. See the instructions in the next column to the right. Download the following reports from the Readysell store for list reports and try them out: "Bad GP% Contract Sale Lines", "Geoff_Product Movements Report_With_Source_LastCat_GP_Margin", "Product Price Level low GP report", "Sale Invoice Line Low GP Report", "Sale Invoice Line Low GP Report By Contract", If you have more than one site download and run: "Dead Stock Report by Product Site" If you have concerns about product units download and run: "Product unit review against the price book for products sold by each and by box"	Which sales are losing me money and what can I do about it List Reports Key List Reports Overview Creating a new list report	List reports allow you go generate lists where the list you want is not already on the Readysell Navigation panel.
The Readysell store	There is a separate Readysell store button for Form reports, List reports and Analysis reports.	Don't reinvent reports, make use of the reports that have already been shared to the Readysell store by other dealers.	Share the reports being built and used by other dealers.	Easy as pie, a must have skill for your business.	Use the Browse option on each of the Readysell store buttons for Form reports, List reports and Analysis report. Download and try any that look interesting to you. Download the "Bad GP% Contract Sale Lines report from the Readysell store.	Readysell store	The bad GP contract and sale reports on the store are useful to most sites.
History buttons	Customer history Product history	One popup that shows you many lists and views around history for a customer or product	All the history you need for customers and products in one place and accessible anywhere you can see a customer or product	Easy as pie, a must have skill for your business.	Access the history button for products and customers. Add subtotals and filters to one of the history list views for products and customers	Product History Customer history	You can further taylor the list views shown on the history popup window.
Customer web page for printing invoices, statements and reviewing account balances		A online window into their account with your business for each of your customers.	Never reprint a invoice again, provide a better service to your customers.	Easy as pie, a must have skill for your business.	Access your account on the Readysell customer portal, then reprint an invoice and a statement	Logging into the Readysell Helpdesk	We believe this feature is under untilised. We want to help more of you use this feature to assist your customers.
General ledger live P&L list view	Select period ranges Planning a budget for profit is critical.	View and drill into your profit situation in real time	Don't just use financials to feed tax figures to your accountant. Actively plan and manage your profit. Don't just drift, seek a targeted profit figure daily, weekly, monthly and yearly	Easy	View your profit by month for the current financial year. Drill into detailed transactions that are dragging down you profit figures.	Live Profit and Loss report	You can load monthly sales budgets into Readsyell (or daily sales budgets). Then compare results with what you expected. We believe Readysell's budgeting features are very underused. We are interested in helping a few sites start to use budgets.
Online support ticket portal		Track your support tickets with Readysell	Keep up to date with progress on your support issues at Readysell	Easy	Check your current ticket status	Viewing your existing tickets Customer Tools Help Home	Make sure at least two people in your business know how to access your support tickets.
Actionable metrics		A list of key business metrics displayed on the initial dashboard	Keep yourself informed about key business indicators	Easy	Check your dead stock level from actionable metrics	Actionable Metrics	It is worth looking at the metrics at least occasionally. As you can learn from them.
Extending reporting using excel exports		A list of suggested products that might be converted to ezcodes	Continually improve your compliance with Office Brands product data standards	Medium	Find out if you have any products that could be converted to ezcodes	Use Excel with the fuzzy matching extension to get more of your products converted to ezcodes and OC Codes	If you need a report quite a bit and if you can't get the exact answer from Readysell. It may well be worth exporting an excel spreadsheet and doing a few manual adjustments to the output to get what you need.
Plan your reporting procedure		Knowing reports are available is not enough, you need to plan when they are to be run by whom and what follow up action to take	Get more sustainable business benefits from your reports.	Easy	Build your first daily, weekly, monthly report plan by next week.	Procedure for taking action using a report	If you have a plan, you are likely to continue using reports. Especially if you can get them scheduled.
Extra: Report groups for financial report writing	Financial report writer Coming: category report grouping	Slice and dice your financial reports the way you like it. Coming: group up your categories for more control over sales reports	Get more out of your financial information. Coming: Look at your categories in many different ways.	Moderate skill level required. Probably not relevant to many sites.	Add a report to your financial report writer for cash this year vs last year.	Financial report generation	We don't expect many of you to need to use this option.
Extra: Dashboards		Lists, graphs and charts around key areas of interest for each user.	Lists and charts that give you a snapshot of the business tailored to suit each role the business.	Hard to customize. Requires that users are attached to the correct role.	Add a list of new customers to a dashboard and display that dashboard for your user	Setting up User to access a startup Dashboard	Setting up your own Dashboards is quite a lot of work and we don't expect many of you to need to use this option.
Extra: Key performance indicators		Sparkline graphs and figures comparing performance of key business functions over time.	What more can I say. A great potential benefit not currently used by many users	High level of skill required to setup your own key performance indicators.	Add a new KPI scorecard, Add a new KPI on low margin sales count by month vs last year.	KPI Scorecards KPI Definitions Setting up your own custom key performance indicators	We don't expect many of you to need to use this option.

Making best use of your reports

Now you know how to run some reports, what should you do with them?

Best practice is to:

Have a fixed daily, weekly, monthly reporting procedure with assigned responsibilities and stick to it. Knowing the reports you need alone will not work. You need to put in place the procedures to run them and make use of them.
Have a well defined business plan and understand how each report helps you comply with your business plan. You need standards to make reports effective.
Avoid running reports where possible, instead inform your team about the information they need using screen colouring, lists and filters. We want to display the information your team needs naturally and automatically as part of them completing their daily tasks
Use reports when we need to send information to external parties like customers and suppliers
Use reports when you want to sit back and analyse trends in your business. You need to take time to mull over the results shown on the reports. Just running a management report itself is not useful unless you take time out of your business, grab a coffee and really look at what the report means to you

What's next:

Implement a daily, weekly, monthly reporting plan in your business.
Start making use of at least one additional report on a regular basis.

Further reading:

Technician productivity reporting

Analysis Reports

Reporting on contracts

What do I get for my reporting