When you're taking a look at your business' profitability, one of the factors to consider is whether your Principals and/or your Customers are generating a good ROI (return on investment).  Being able to track the ratio of earnings to time spent on these partners gives you a general idea of the success of your sales efforts and your profitability. 


We all have our favorites - favorite manufacturers and favorite customers.  These are the people who we feel most comfortable with, who appreciate us, and who we spend most of our time working for (manufacturer) or selling to (customer).  What we don't often do is check to make sure that the time spent is worth it - i.e. a good ROI.

There are a few cases where manufacturers will send out sales and commission reports with Account Numbers that are not unique, with more than one customer or location represented by a single number.  Some examples include:

• Multiple branch locations, such as individual retail locations with a central billing location.
• Trace sales reports that show the End Users to which goods are shipping.
• Design house that uses contract manufacturers in their OEM products.

For these case, the Account Number being used by the manufacturer doesn't track to the location within the Rep Agencies territory, or necessarily to the same sales rep as might be assigned the main billing location.  It is, of course, important to get the correct location and correct sales rep for each Invoice, especially in cases where bonuses or split commissions are paid based on those sales.

​With the new year upon us, a common activity is to send out year end summaries to our customers.  In this light, we have made some updates to the ever-popular Customer Snapshot report.

First, and most importantly, we greatly improved the speed of the report when running it for a full year-to-year comparison.  In other words, when you select those 1/1/2017 - 12/31/2017 dates, the report will now much more efficiently and speedily do those calculations for year-to-year percentage growth numbers.

We've also updated the By Month section of the report so that it gets rid of what would have shown a blank year, as most agencies have not started entering data for the new year yet.  Instead we now see a recap of 2017 and percentage growth versus 2016, using those same 1/1/2017-12/31/2017 dates.

A couple of cosmetic changes were also made, specifically for those of you who might be sending or sharing these Customer Snapshot reports with your key accounts: 

1. We've added the "Report Title" parameter (commonly seen on some of our other reports), which allows you to add your own title or summary to the report.  For example, you might put something like "Thank you for a great year.  Here is a recap of how your business with the Manufacturers we represent has grown over the last year.". 

2. We have put your Agency's name in the header, so that is now reads "Your Company Name - Customer Snapshot".  As these reports get passed around, why not have your agency highlighted as much as possible.

Feedback and enhancement requests are always welcome.  Happy New Year.