Two new Dimension have been added to the Sales and Commission as well as the Sales Summary Analysis cubes in Data Analysis.  Dimensions in Data Analysis allow the User to pivot the analysis cubes in different ways to extract more meaningful data.  The addition of these two new fields further the Users' ability to inspect sales and/or commission numbers for greater meaning.

Business Country

In addition to the already existing State, City, and Zip code Dimensions, the Business Country Dimension allows Users to see where their international sales are coming from.  Drag the Business Country Dimension to the left side to get a view of all the Countries that are producing sales; expand a country to see the Customers within that area that are being sold to.

Issued

The Issued checkbox appears on the Invoices in Invoice Entry.  The intended use of the Issued checkbox is to differentiate Orders that have not been shipped by the Manufacturer from Invoices that have been sent.  Using Search Invoices, it is easy to pull up a list of un-Issued Invoices; likewise Users can filter on the Issued column in the Invoice listing.

In Data Analysis, the Issued Dimension allows for a similar reporting mechanism.  Drag the Issued Dimension to the lefthand-area to see the "True" (Issued) and "False" (not Issued) values in the grid to the right.  Filtering out the True values will give you accounting for all of the Orders that are pending, while looking at the True (filtering out the False) will show you just sales and/or commissions for Invoices that have been sent out by the Manufacturer.

The Order Printout report shows the details of an Invoice, Order, Purchase Order, or Quote in the system.  Now an additional piece of information can be optionally shown over the Vendor and Sales Rep section of the report, the Payment Date(s).

When a Payment is entered into the system, a Date is selected for that Payment.  Typically this date is either the check date or the deposit date, depending on how your agency recognizes revenue.  The dates shown on the report are this Issued Date of the Payment(s) on which the Invoice appeared.  For partially paid invoices this will be more than one date, the date of each of the partial payments; if all commissions were paid on one Payment Entry, then there will just be the one date.

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To show these fields, check the box on the Parameters dialog when you run the report, "Show Payment Date(s)?".

​If you don't make Payment Entries in your system, this addition doesn't effect you.  If you don't want to show the Payment information, leave the box unchecked.

The addition to the report allows one to find when a particular invoice was paid; or that it was not paid yet.

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.