How Much Excel is Too Much?

Excel has been around for sometime and has become an indispensable tool

While Excel is a great analytical tool and we encourage its use, small businesses must pay attention not just to the amount of time spent on Excel, but also to the frequency of use and what portion of that effort is redundant.

Meet with your team and determine the amount of time you spend manipulating Excel file s on a daily/weekly basis. Determine redundancy and use a simple equation to evaluate the cost to your business. e.g.; 4 hours per week @ $15/hr is just under $3,000/year. This cost does not include loss of efficiency by conducting other non-Excel related tasks.

Contact us to see if there is an existing report that is similar enough to minimize or eliminate your Excel effort , or about the possibility of creating a custom report to eliminate maintenance of an Excel file and free up time for other tasks.

(213) 438-0600 ext. 502
help@readytoview.com

 

Report Scheduling Reincarnated

This is a major improvement of our Report Scheduling tool.

What makes this special is the ability to use “relative dates” (aka. Multiple Periods), e.g.; Schedule a report “ONCE” to run (indefinitely) at the 1st of every month for the period of the preceding month.

Showroom Owners & Managers:
Relieve your reps & assistants from the task of generating reports for you on regular intervals. Showroom Exchange can do this for you.
You can now schedule automated reports within Showroom Exchange. Configure the settings once and have your reports emailed to you daily, weekly or monthly. The reports will be emailed to the address saved in your settings page. They will include a PDF and CSV/Excel link.

 

To schedule a report, enter report criteria/filters, then at the bottom of the report, click the “schedule this report” button.
Note: to use relative dates, date criteria entries are not considered for scheduled reports.

 

 

schedule report1

 

 

 

In the following pop-up, enter the title of the report (subject line of your email), then select the interval (frequency) of how often/how many times you want to receive the report.

schedule report

 

Daily, Weekly, and Monthly reports become more detailed as you can choose to make them examine a static period or multiple periods (relative dates).

Selecting a static period means that the reports will examine the same date range (either order date or cancel date) every time a report is run. This is not the preferred date-criteria selection as the same period will be considered for the report over and over again. e.g.; a report scheduled to analyze Jan 2014 generated in Feb 2014 or anytime in the future, will always consider Jan 2014 as the date filter.

With Multiple Periods, every time the report is generated, it will examine a different date range based on the interval and period you select. For example, if you schedule a recurring Daily report for 9 am, with multiple periods, looking at the “Previous period”, you will receive reports that analyze the previous day. i.e.; you arrive at your desk to find yesterday’s activity in your Inbox.

There are more examples below for Daily, Weekly, and Monthly scheduled reports.

The report below is configured to run on Mondays and Fridays of every other week, analyzing sales with cancel dates in the following week. It will run ten times before stopping.

schedule report4

 

 

The example report below will run every day @ 11:59 PM forever, analyzing sales ordered on that day.

schedule report6

 

 

In the example below, the report will be generated on the first of every third month until 12/31/15 and will analyze sales with cancel dates in the previous month.

schedule report7

 

 

On the report page, click “maintain schedule reports” to delete or edit existing scheduled reports.

schedule report5

Seasons & Projections

We offer Seasons & Projections as optional features of Showroom Exchange.

With seasons, you can mark orders by season and season year. This allows you to track, search, and filter orders/customer order history by season.

Below are screenshots of adding an order, the orders tab, and the customer tab with seasons.

seasons6

seasons

seasons2

 

You may also automate the assignment of Seasons during order entry by defining rule-sets per mfr. e.g.; Assign any order entered for MfrX between 1/1/ANY_Year and 3/30/ANY_YEAR to Fall.

seasons5

 

The seasons feature also allows you to further analyze your data with two additional reports:
1) Forecasting Analysis by Season and
2) Season Comparison.

seasons4

 

Forecasting Analysis by Season

The seasons feature lets you make projections of your sales based on seasons. You can assign projected dollar values to customers as well as mfr’s (see below).

assign projection2 assign projection

 

 

 

You can then use the “Forecasting Analysis by Season” report to summarize your projections as well as compare them to your actual sales once orders have been entered (see below).

assign projection1

 

assign projection3

 

Season Comparison

In the Season Comparison Report, you can compare bookings by season and year, much like mfr yearly comparison and cust yearly comparison. Below, a sample report result:

seasons3

 

If you’re interested in activating the Seasons and Projections add-on to your showroom’s account, send us an email to help@readytoview.com and check out our pricing page for details:
https://www.showroomexchange.com/pricing.aspx

Reporting Essentials

Essential Features for Reporting Results

See all of the features related to generating a report, such as exporting, printing, and personalized e-blasts.

Click to learn more…

 

Top Customers Report

Learn how to generate a report that shows your top buying customers based on booking or shipping amounts.

Click to learn more…

 

Project Your Commissions

Estimate how much commission you will receive in the future.

Click to learn more…

Top Customers Report

The Top Customer Report is one the most frequently used reports. It to used to list customers with the most sales based on search criteria.

Under the reports tab (as shown below, 1), click on “Top Customers” (2). Hover the cursor over a report name to see a description of that report.

top customers

1. As shown below, first enter how many top customers you want to see (e.g. top 5, top 10, top 100).

2. Select the order status you would like to base your top customers on (e.g. top 10 customer based on active dollars over shipped dollars). We normally suggest using active over booked because it’s a more realistic since it considers any revisions/cancellations.

3. Select the filters you would like (e.g. top 10 customers over a certain time period, from a certain market, or from a certain state).

4. Select if you want to include inactive customers and manufacturers.

5. Click “Generate Report” to see the results.

 

top customers2

 

 

A KEY SEARCH CRITERIA TO BE AWARE OF…
…is “rep selection.” If you are filtering by rep, decide between examining customers assigned reps or reps assigned to orders (rep1).

 

 

1. As shown below, the resulting report lists the top customers by rank, ordering them by dollar amount (2).

3. From the report, you can extract a customer’s email, make notes, and change market call labels.

top customers3

Essential Features for Report Results

When reviewing report results, there are several useful features that make your day-to-day more efficient and increase your business.
NOTE:
Showroom owners/managers may restrict their reps ability to Save and/or Print the report result.

Once a report is generated, there are many ways you can work with the result:

1) Clicking the printer icon allows you to print the report.

2) Clicking the floppy disk icon saves/exports the report. In the drop down menu next to the icon, you can select the file type the file will save as. Most commons formats are PDF and CSV (for Excel).

3) You can send a Personalized Bulk Email to all of the contacts within the report. You can also export a list of all email address within the report that you can use to create a bulk email.

4) You can email the report itself.

5) You can create a note under all of the customers within the report.

report features

 

 

 

Saved Searches

If you have a repeated report that you often use the same criteria, save time by saving the report criteria so you don’t have to reenter the filters every time.

1) Click “Save Report Criteria” near the top of the page.

2) Click “add current search” once the criteria you wish to save has been entered.

3) Enter a name you would like to save the search as. Click the green check mark.

4) Click “saved searches” for a list of your searches to appear. Delete your saved searches by clicking “remove all searches”

saved search reports

Project Your Commissions

Commission Projections, one of our most popular reports, estimates the commission your showroom will receive in the future based on realistic parameters, e.g.; what % of your booking will ship and when you typically get paid, such as 2 or 3 months after the cancellation date.

 

commission projection report1

“by rep/mfr” selection is ideal for reporting your reps’ expected commissions.
“by mfr” selection is ideal for reporting your showroom’s expected commission.

commission projection report2

 

 

1. “% of booked orders that will ship,” is used to calculate the commission due – this the % you expect the mfr/brand to ship.

2. Check the box next to “Make my AR look more realistic” to shift commission dollar values to the months you are most likely to receive them.

 

commission projection report3

 

 

 

 

Sample results:

 

commission projection report4

commission projection report5

How to Block Exporting/Printing Reports and Other Information

Admin users/reps can prevent regular users/reps from printing/exporting reports or other private information, such as commissions and customer information.

From “setup categories”, select “showroom users,” click on the name you wish to apply restrictions to, and confirm that certain check-boxes are selected/un-selected:

 

settings--- users

1) “Allow Print Report on Customer View” is unchecked (you might want to also consider the options below this one because they relate to exporting)
These options help prevent the user from printing information on the main tabs (e.g. orders, invoices, etc.)

block export_printing1

2) “Allow reports result to email” is unchecked.
This prevents the user from emailing report information.

block export_printing3

3) “Allow Export from Views” is unchecked.
This will prevent the user from exporting-to-excel on the main tabs

block export_printing2

4) “hide Print option on report result” and “hide Save As option on report result” are checked
This will hide the printer icon and the save icon for all reports.

block export_printing4

You can choose the options that best fit your showroom policy.

 

WE ALWAYS RECOMMEND THAT YOU SIGN-IN WITH THE NON-ADMIN — USER’S CREDENTIALS TO CONFIRM THE RESULTING PERMISSIONS MEET YOUR EXPECTATIONS.

 

restrict printing customer info

Enhanced Commission Reporting for Open Orders

Open Orders report now includes additional options for commission calculation.

“show comm for SR rep only”
useful for the mfr/brand. This report does not display your reps’ commissions.

“show all comms except SR rep”
perfect for internal analysis. what is owed to each rep.

“show comm1 thru comm6”
good for auditing/analysis.

“show comm #”
review a specific rep’s commission. e.g.; if you always assign a sales-rep to rep2, select comm2 with this option.

The “show commission calculation” checkbox is available only for select userIDs authorized by the showroom owner or manager.
To enable this feature for your rep (specific userIDs) please email help@readytoview.com

 

Annual Sales by Month Report Now Supports Missed Bookings

The annual sales by month report in its default form will only include customers that have orders for the specified year. e.g.; if [customer] Brasscactus has 2011 bookings but not 2012, the 2012 row would simply not show.

With the new “show missed customer bookings” checkbox enabled, now Brasscactus will be shown in the 2012 row with $0 bookings.

The highlighted fields below must be populated to enable the “show missed customer bookings” checkbox.

Show Missed Customers

Results with “show missed customer bookings” checked:

Show Missed Customers Checked

Results without “show missed customer bookings” checked:

Show Missed Customers Unchecked