Mentoring week 5 reporting followup FAQ

Owned by John Nairn (Unlicensed)
Last updated: Jun 04, 2020 by Sharon Harden (Unlicensed)
5 min read

I have completed the week 5 reporting session, but am still not sure what reports are the best ones for my business


Week 2 is about, among other things, letting you know about list views and screen customization. You need to be comfortable with using all those tools.  It would be great if you were using conditional formatting etc. to extract your business information.  I will discuss this a little more below.

Week 3 is about making you aware of the range of reporting options available and starting you thinking about report planning. We will be expanding on how to use reports in weeks 4 and 5. I want to make a start in week 3. I want to get everyone started on making better use of reports by using at least one report you were not using before, starting on report plans and knowing what report options are available.  Then to get you to implement one new report and the start of a plan for reporting.

Week 4 and week 5 are about best practice, what information about your business should you be watching and how you should get it.  We will be discussing what information dealers use to run their business in those sessions.  You will use your knowledge from week 2 and 3 as you implement the practices in week 4 and 5. 


 How do I get ‘real time reports' I seem to have to wait to the end of the day to get reports?
Generally:

  • Use list views to inform yourself about how your business is operating without running any reports if possible. You can use a combination of the following to tell you and your team about important operational issues, especially about minute to minute "real time" issues:
    • Conditional formatting.  Make things you should be paying attention too show as a different colour on your list view
    • Filters. Make a list view that shows only the things you are interested in.  Like sales that have back orders, are overdue, are waiting for shipment etc.
    • Column chooser, drag and drop the columns you want onto your list views
    • Report totals and sub totals, show counts and sum of values for the things you are interested in
    • Show group by box, subtotal and group the important things together
    • View variants, once you have the view you like save it
    • Change screen layout on detail views, add the fields you most care about to the screen and remove the once you do not want
    • Copy model by role button in tools, copy your list and detail view customizations to other users
  • Reports are also required, but do as much as you can with list views:
    • Readysell builds "Cubes" overnight that contains summaries of your information to be used when calculating totals on the fly would be too slow or difficult to do.  As a result any report where the data source name starts with "sales by.." or where the report itself has the "Cube" tick on is cubed data.  Cubed data will not update until overnight. 
    • Reports for information about the current day should run from the source data itself.  There are a lot of reports that run from source data.  You can also make a list or analysis report quite quickly yourself if you have custom requirements.  Or add a new filter to an existing report.
    • As a rule of thumb, if you are using an analysis report to understand sales always start your report from "sale invoice lines"


 I have sales targets for category day. We normally check throughout the day to see if we are on track. I can not work out how to do this

  • I can't tell you the best solution.  There is more than one way to handle this.  We need to try a few approaches and see which best suits you:
  •  Make sure you have a clear way of breaking up the sales by company.  If category suites you, make a list of which categories go with which company.  Make sure you pick all the categories at the same level, so that you do not count any sales twice
    • Analysis reports
      • Make a analysis report based on "sale invoice lines".  Note: If you have a lot of batch invoicing, "sale shipment lines" would be better.  Analysis reports can filter on calculated fields.  The categories at each level are calculated fields.  So you can't filter on say all level 2 categories on a list report.  Making Analysis reports probably better in this case. 
      •  Add a number of filters to your analysis report based on one category or another.  For example "category level 2" and date is today.
      • Save your analysis report as a name.  Like "company 1 today", "company 2 today" etc.
      • Run the reports periodically through the day.

As your products covert to Office Brands ezcodes the categories will change.  This might effect the result.


I am a bit lost not knowing how the divisions in the business are doing individually. I was looking at reports and trying to run L-064 - Sales By Day By Site By Category but I can only pull up one category at a time

Use an Analysis report on sale invoice line.  This will allow you to look at many categories at once.

I have seen that you can use the sum symbol to add up lines – but I seem not be able to do this. When and how can this happen.

  •  Use the show group by box.  See:
    Group and report totals

  • Use an Analysis report on sale invoice line.  Analysis report are expressly for summing up totals.  See:

https://readysell.atlassian.net/wiki/display/RSELL/Analysis+Reports

 I saw Di moving column up into the top margin and create” descending”/ groups of data. Can I have a run down on how to do this

When I go into column chooser I spend a lot of time trying to find where stuff is. Is there a list/tree that I can have access to – to help me get the right 

  • There is a search window on the field list.  Except on Analysis reports.  See generally:

https://readysell.atlassian.net/wiki/display/RSELL/Dragging+and+dropping+a+field+onto+a+list+view

Can we access old reports eg we are working on bring down the dead stock level. Can I pull a report in 6 months to show how it has dropped

  • Dead stock is not one of the fields we track by time.  There is a trade off, tracking things over time in the system slow the system down.  So we don't track trends in everything over time.  I suggest you add dead stock report as a monthly task to your daily, weekly, monthly report plan.  Then export the report each month and save it in a shared folder.  Then over time you can compare your reports.  That would work for now.  Eventually we may be able to schedule a dead stock report and get it to save into a folder.  But I suggest you discuss this with the group as part of the best practice sessions.

The Management Dashboard – has metrics behind it – I cannot see what the actual metrics are e.g. how is dead stock defined. It also has a red/yellow/green based on a target. Where can I see what the target is.

  • If you click on any of the metrics a help page displays explaining the metric.  There are noes around where you set the targets on the documentation.  You use system references.  See: Management Dashboard


What are the key reports that other dealers are using to monitor their businesses.

  • I suggest we all discuss this as part of the best practice discussions over the next two weeks.  I know Office Brands are also working on a list of daily, weekly and monthly suggested reports.  I have a few suggestions, like dead stock and low margin sale lines.  But I am trying to make sure you know the tools first and letting best practice be covered by the best practice sessions.  Lets see what comes out of the best practice discussion first.  I know this will be covered in best practice.  But I will hep you with one or two reports to help get you moving.