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Tracking the source of the sale

Posted: 12 Apr 2019, 09:38
by tjobbe
Hi everyone.

Our company sells packaging, we have an online shop, a walk-in showroom, and a delivery round locally.

I want to be able to track the source of every single sale.

Currently, our website talks with Sage using Zynk, a third party sales order import plugin. Everything else is added onto the system manually as a sales order.

What I need to do is to be able to run a report and see how well the sales from the delivery round our doing, or how many sales we made in the last 3 months from people walking into the showroom and purchasing.

I have about 10 purchase methods in total, and I want to know how to set it up so that when we create a new sales order we physically log the method to that sale too, everything but online sales needs to be tracked.

At the moment, all I know is that £xxx is from online sales, therefore £xxx subtracted from our total sales mean we made £yyy from offline sales - but that is the most I can break it down.

How woud I create these "methods" in Sage that we are then able to log the sales onto?

One thought after speaing to Sage is to create global nominal codes and then in the sales order we'd click on Footer > Global NC and assign the code / method.

Our bookkeeper says that this will mess with stock levels, somehow, are they right? If so, what's the best way to do this?

Re: Tracking the source of the sale

Posted: 15 Apr 2019, 10:14
by brucedenney
It would not have any impact on Stock levels to use global, however... It gets rid of product analysis in the accounts.

There are a number of ways you could do this, it depends to some extent where you are reporting on your sales from.

Sales orders or Invoices are a great place to do this, because you also have the information about what products got bought, so you can go into great detail.

You could use the global nominal as a "flag" to indicate the source but there are lots of other fields that could be used as well.

The Custom analysis fields are the most obvious candidates, but there are other ways.

You could use the username, by creating multiple users for Sage, you log in as "<name>DEL" (delivery round) and do the invoices/orders then log in as "<name>SHOW" and do the Showroom ones.

It may be that you can use the existing user information, if Janet posts all the delivery rounds and Bill is in the showroom, then you could filter based on those!

The type of sale could be logged other ways in Analysis_1 you could have a service of letter that indicate various aspect of an order, S could be showroom, D Delivery, W web, but you could then break that down further with subsequent letters to give more detail. Delivery could have the Round, the Distance. Showroom could have Male Female. A third letter (T)rade or (R)etail and so on...

You can then have a filter based on the second letter of Analysis_1 to report against round/gender.

The problem with these is we rely on the human entering the correct information.

The right solution for you is dependant on a large number of factors, you need to understand the limitations, strengths and weaknesses of each approach to be able to decide which is right for you, or at least which is least wrong for you.