Sales Department Reports

So far in this chapter we have been focusing on reports that pertain to Accounting and Finance. In this video, and in the rest of this chapter we will look at reports that affect other departments in the company, and that starts with those for sales. Before we get started though, I want to let you know, there are a lot of reports that can provide the sales organization with meaningful data. We will only be covering a few of them here due to time constraints, however you should go in on your own and explore what else is available. Ready, let’s go. We’ll start by going to Reports, then Order Management. We’ll take a look at the Sales Orders Register, Open Sales Orders, and Sales Orders Pending Fulfillment. So, I’ll go ahead and open each of these in a new tab, and I’m doing this by holding down the control key as I click each of the menu options. First let’s look at the Sales Order Register. This report shows all sales orders for a given period, one order per line. This can be useful when you need a list of all your orders. You should be aware though, that if you don’t have permission to see a sales order, it will not be visible here, and this is the same across all other reports. What I mean by that is, NetSuite’s reporting engine only shows entries that you are allowed to see, so if you have restricted permissions you might not see everything. Below, we have a date range picker, where we can select a “From” and “To” date range. If we want to get more information about any of these transactions we can. We can hover over the document, or hover over the customer name, and we have the option to drill down and see more information by clicking. I’ll go ahead and open this sales order in a new tab, again by control clicking, and we can take a look. So, this is a good way to get more information about a specific SO, customer, or other record, when you’re inside a report. We can also see that closed and billed orders are listed here, whereas the next two reports we’ll look at don’t show them. We’ll go ahead and click over to our Open Sales Orders. Closed and Billed statuses are not listed here, however Pending Approval is. In the next report we look at, Pending Approval is not included, so you can, in some way, think of these reports acting as a funnel. Below, we have a date picker, however unlike the previous report, this date picker is for an “As of” date. That’s because this is a snapshot report, as opposed to a range report. Another thing to notice is the open amount on this partially fulfilled order; it’s in the mid four-thousand-dollar range. I’ll go ahead and open the transaction in a new tab, and let’s take a look. We can see that the subtotal and total for this order are in the five-thousand-dollar range. The report shows the amount of the order we still need to fulfill. So, in this instance, some of the product has already been sent to the customer, however we still have more product that we owe them. Let’s go ahead and close this, and click over to the next tab. The last report in the three we just opened is for Sales Orders Pending Fulfillment. Again, we have a single date selector so we can see this as of a specific point in time. Here we can see customers and their ordered, fulfilled and committed items. This report is often used by either sales, logistics, or customer service to view orders that need to still be fulfilled. Since report restrictions automatically narrow this down to just those customers you are allowed to see, I often see sales reps use this as a quick way to keep tabs on which customers are waiting on orders being fulfilled. This is especially useful in high value or high touch sales where there is constant communication between a purchaser and a company rep. Let’s go ahead and close these three reports, and look at a few more that are helpful to a sales manager. Sales managers often want to look at customer breakdown reports, which list or group customers based on key metrics or criteria. If we go to Reports, then scroll down to Customer/Receivables, I have three “Customers By” reports, where I can look at customers grouped by specific criteria. I also have this Customer Profitability report that sums up how profitable each customer is. For each of these, I have both the summary version, which is what I get if I click on the title, or a detail version that I can click on here. In the reports we looked at a moment ago, there was only a summary version; you may remember the lack of a detail option. Let’s go ahead and open the Customer by Sales Rep and the Customer Profitability reports, both in new tabs. The Customers by Sales Rep report, gives a quick roll up of how many customers each sales rep has. This is useful if you want to figure out if customers are evenly distributed between reps. We can see that Mark Grogan has significantly less customers than Mary Redding, though this doesn’t tell us the reason. Miles Gray is listed in bold, above the other two sales reps. This is because Miles is the manager for both of them. If we collapse Miles, the total number of customers for both of his employees shows to the right of his name. We can collapse his manager Alex Wolfe as well, if we want to. If we expand these back out, we can drill down on any employee record by clicking on their name. So here we have Mike Grogan’s employee record, and we can see his supervisor is Miles Gray. I’m able to view this record, because I have administrator permissions. If you’re following along, I suspect for most of you, this didn’t work, and you instead got a warning message. This is because of permissions, and it is going to depend on how your administrator has configured your NetSuite account. I’ll go ahead and close Mark’s employee record. We have the option to view this data in a graphical format by clicking the graph icon down here. Right now, we are looking at this as a bar graph, but there are a few other options. I can click here, and we can select a line. We can also select a pie chart and that’s what’s probably most appropriate for the data we are looking at. This chart shows us how many customers belong to each sales rep. No sales rep is the largest down here, but we also have Mary Redding who has a disproportionately large number of customers. If this were real data, then this might be a situation we wanted to try and resolve. For some reports and graphing options, we can select to compare multiple pieces of data. For this one we can’t, and this is due to only having one column. We see this when we click either of these two fields. We also have the option to see more or less than ten sales reps if we want. For most reports that have a summary and a detailed version, you will see this View Detail link up here, if you are in the summary view. If you are in the detail view this will change to a summary link. If we click this, we get a more detailed version where we can see each customer listed, one per line, as well as some data about them such as when they were created. On the Customer Profitability Summary, we see all of our customers listed. Here we see the total cost we’ve spent to acquire and keep the customer, and the total revenue they have brought in. The total profit column subtracts the cost from the revenue. Usually you will want to watch out for customers with a low or negative total profit. I’ve seen some companies customize this report to list a percentage amount or ratio as an extra column. I’ve also seen some highlight problem customers to quickly find them. We can view a graphical version of the data in this report as well, by clicking on the same graphing icon. Again, we have several graphing options, but bar graph usually makes the most sense for this report. The data we are looking at is showing us column one, which is the total cost column. We can show a second column and compare these if we want. For this let’s pick total revenue which is column two. If ten weren’t enough we could change this to show maybe the top twenty-five customers. The columns in red represent the total cost, and that is how we are organizing the data. If we wanted to use a different column such as total revenue we would have to select that where we have column one selected. I’ll go ahead and close this, and we can continue exploring. This report has an option to view a more detailed version as well. Initially, this looks like there is no data, however this is because of the date filters here at the bottom. For some reports, the date selections propagate between the summary and detail versions, but for some they do not. There are a few reasons for this, including date settings being sticky, and how dates can be passed in the request. But if this happens to you, go ahead and set the correct dates, and click the refresh button. Anytime you change any of the filters at the bottom, you need to click refresh to refresh the data. Now we can see some data for this report, and this gives us more detail around customer profitability. If a normally profitable customer became unprofitable, perhaps due to a job that went wrong, as an example, we could see that in this detail report. I’ll go ahead and close these, and we will take a look at one last set of reports. If we go to Reports, then scroll down to Sales, we have several “Sales By” reports, such as by Customer, by Item, by Sales Rep, etc. These are similar to the “Customers By” reports we just finished looking at. We can see that for these, we also have a detail version. Let’s go ahead and look at the Detail version of the Sales by Customer, and the Summary version of the Sales by Sales Rep. If we click over to the Sales by Customer tab, we see very detailed information, down to the journal entry level, for each transaction. This may be more information than we need though. We can click back to the summary, even if we started directly at the detail version if we want or need to. For this report, the summary may provide us with a better view of the information. Here we can see each customer, and what their raw sales were. This should look similar to Customer Profitability from earlier. In a lot of these reports, there will be data that overlaps. Which one you use is going to depend on what you are trying to do. If we go over to the Sales by Sales Rep report, we see a nice matrix view of each rep’s sales numbers. Once again, we have an option for a more detailed version of this, but in this case, what we are looking at is probably detailed enough. This report is useful, if you want to figure out when and where sales may have started slipping. We can collapse levels of the report, and can drill down to more specific data if needed, but at this point that is nothing new. Right now, we are looking at the header based on months. The reason you’re not seeing every month, for example we skip from February directly to May of 2013, is because I don’t have any data for those time periods. If months is too detailed, or not detailed enough, we can change this to report by another time period using this column field. I’ll go ahead and change this to quarter, and now we see the data broken down by quarter. I also want to call out that over to the right we have this total column as well. This was hidden before, due to how much data we had on screen, but we could have scrolled to the right and it would have been there. Each of these reports are pretty good out of the box, however I encourage you to use them as a starting point and customize them for your own unique business needs.