Comprehending Sales Analysis

[Blonde brain]

Hi,

I am more than a little confused by the results we are getting when running a Sales Analysis.

For example:
Actinic reports we have sold 6 of a particular item.
Yet knowing that i hadn't i investigated this further.
It turns out 2 where sold and shipped, 2 where ordered but payment failed so the orders were zeroed out and cancelled and then another one sold (no 5) but was then placed on back order creating the 6th.

I find this incredible. Even if i chose to isolate the analysis to show orders shipped it still provides me with the figure of 5.

I am hoping that i have made an embarrassing mistake and that this is not the normal way in which this tool works. If it is then the figures are too far out to be useful.

Any help on this one would be appreciated.

[WILKO92]

To be quite frank, I find the reports section a joke!

Unless I have missed a trick, we can only generate reports that include completed orders. This means that at the end of each month when we raise a Vat invoice for the months internet business in order to incorporate these sales into our core business, we have to manually calculate the goods, shipping and vat totals for all of the incomplete orders for that month.

There doesn't seem to be any provision for those of us that employ invoice date vat accounting.(most of the business world)

When I get some time I intend sorting through the access data to try and sort something out with excel.

[brian.mc]

Unless I have missed a trick, we can only generate reports that include completed orders. This means that at the end of each month when we raise a Vat invoice for the months internet business in order to incorporate these sales into our core business, we have to manually calculate the goods, shipping and vat totals for all of the incomplete orders for that month.

There doesn't seem to be any provision for those of us that employ invoice date vat accounting.(most of the business world)

When I get some time I intend sorting through the access data to try and sort something out with excel.

In Reports|Report Selection|Sales|Sales Analysis|Report Options, under the Date From and To Fields, there is a button marked "More options". Clicking this will bring up various options for inclusion in your report. The option "Include Orders With" lets you select from 3 choices: Payment Received, Invoice Printed or Goods Shipped". You can select from any combination of these: any 1; any 2, or all 3, and the report will reflect your choice. So, if, for example, you receive payments by credit card when the order is placed, then by only selecting "Payment Received" your report will include all orders marked as paid. If, on the other hand, your customers are invoiced before payment, then selecting "Invoice Printed" would produce the desired results.

[WILKO92]

The problem is that we do not take payment until we ship. We print the invoice at the shipping stage to include with the shipped order.

At the end of the month, we end up with a number of orders for non stocked items that we are waiting to arrive. These will be neither shipped, payment allocated or invoice printed.

The way that the report section works means that these orders will not appear in the report generated at the end of the month.

However, when they have been shipped/payment allocated/invoiced, they will appear on a report but the original order date dictates which month they go in.

For example, an order dated 27/06/06 is not shipped until 05/07/06. This order will not show on the monthly report generated on 30/06/06 for our June month end, nor the July report generated 31/07/06. It would be on a June report generated after 05/07/06.

[Bruce]

Graham,

Like you rightly said the main issue here is that the date used is hard coded to the date the order was placed by the application and there is no way that this can be changed.

Let me run this past development and I will update you with their comments.

Kind regards,

[WILKO92]

Thanks Bruce.

Surely I am not the only user who does Vat by invoice date.

[Bruce]

Graham,

Please accept my apologies. This one slipped by me, thanks for the reminder too. Will update you shortly.

Kind regards,

[Krithika]

Hi Graham

The way the reports option have been set, one of the conditions, i.e, Shipping, Invoicing and/or payment receipt needs to have been fulfilled for an order to be included in the report within any date range.
In case the payment and/or invoice bit has been completed then you will just need to untick Goods Shipped to have the orders correctly filtered.

The only other way to get around this would be to generate the report after all previous month's orders have been processed.

[WILKO92]

Any news on this one Bruce?

[Bruce]

Hi Graham,

Krithika's response above is the update. You will have to use the filtering provided to get results that include all orders placed for the month.

Kind regards,