Analysis of current or historical product categories, sale persons and sale territories
Sometimes you want to analyze your sales based on common values like for example product category, salesperson, and/or sales territory. You can change the way the data is reported by electing to either use the values that were saved at the time of the invoice or the current value for those master file fields.
Salespersons and sale territories are two properties that can be set up and used to analyze sales:
Users of the system can be salespeople. Those users have the salesperson checkbox ticked
Sales territories can be created. Salespersons can be associated with a sales territory. Most users just use salespersons, but you can further analyze your sales by territory if required.
You need to set one or both of those up properly. Then as time passes, you will be able to report on sales trends by salesperson and territories.
The best practice is to set up some of your users as salespersons. Then make sure that every existing and new customer has a primary salesperson setup when the customer card is created or reviewed. That way you can track sales against salespeople in the future.
If you have not set up salespersons on your cards, you can manually enter a salesperson on each sale, but this is not practical in most cases. So you are unlikely to be able to run any sales analysis by a salesperson until you clean up your data and set the salespersons and possibly territories on your customer cards.
Three fields can be used to identify people involved in sales.
When a customer is put on a sale order or shipment the shipment is invoiced. The current primary salesperson on the customer card defaults to the salesperson field on the order, shipment, and invoice. You can manually change the salesperson on the transaction individually if you want to. For example, if you want one particular sale to be attributed to a different salesperson. When the invoice is posted, the salesperson from the transaction at the time the invoice was posted is saved permanently on the invoice. The salesperson saved on the invoice stays the same, even if the default primary salesperson on the customer card is changed at a later date. This is the salesperson at the time the invoice was posted and is frozen in time at the date the invoice was posted
Sales transactions can have a customer and a customer can have a current primary salesperson. The primary salesperson on the customer can change from time to time. If you look at or report on invoices and you are using a primary salesperson. Then the invoice is shown based on the primary salesperson right now. As the primary salesperson on the card is always as of this moment. If you change the primary salesperson on the card. Then all current and older invoices will show the customer's primary salesperson as being the current primary salesperson.
Sales transactions also have a field 'created by person'. This is the staff/team member in your business that created the transaction. This may be the salesperson, but it can be a POS operator, the system itself, or anybody on your team that created the transaction. This field is less useful for measuring the relationship between your team member and the customer. Just about anybody can create or finalize a sale. We don't normally use this field for sales analysis or reporting.
The procedure for setting this up at an existing site is:
Review your users and decide which will be salespersons
Go through your customer list and assign a default salesperson to each customer where relevant
Contact Readysell and we will copy the default customer salesperson from the customer cards to all existing historical sales transactions. We will then run the task to refresh the cubes so you can run sales reports
Reporting on historical product categories, salespersons, and sales territories
The product category, sale person, and sale territory that was current at the time of a sale invoice are recorded on the sale invoice. If you build an analysis report from sale invoice lines and report on any of those fields you will get an analysis based on the value of those fields at the time the sale invoice was posted. This allows you to group and total sales data based on the historical at-time-of-sale invoice values of product categories, salespersons, and/or sales territories. This is required for some reports, like sales commissions.
Reporting on current product categories, salespersons, and sales territories
The current product category, sale person, and sale territory exist on the product for the sale invoice line and on the customer for the sale invoice header. If you drag the current product category, sale invoice line sale invoice's customer salesperson or territory onto the analysis report. You will get an analysis based on the value of those fields using the current values. This allows you to group and total sales data based on the current values of product categories, salespersons, and/or sales territories. This is required if you want to see how your sales history breaks up based on your current master file data which may have changed since the sales occurred.
Note that all the cubes are built from historical data at the time of the sale invoice. To run your analysis against current values, you have to set the data source of your analysis report to sale invoice lines. You will then be able to drag the current master file fields onto the report. The historical values will still be saved on the invoice and invoice line. But your report will ignore them and use the current values if you drag the current values onto the report.