SageForum for UK versions of Sage 50- Help and support.

Hi there,

Does anyone know if there is a way or a 3rd program available to see how many items a particular customer has ordered.

Example: Customer X has done 20 orders in the last 6 months and I would like to know how many times item X was ordered.

Thanks,
Sam

Invoice Reports - Invoice Details - Product Sales by customer
Alternatively , Sales Orders Reports - Sales Order Details - Sales Orders by Product

The trouble is that there are so many questions it all becomes quite complicated.

Once you know that Bill bought 5 and Jim bought 7 you will start wondering if Jim is a better customer than Bill. you will look at the orders and see that Jim bough 7 but one at a time, whereas Bill bought 5 in one go and was a lot less hassle to service.

So what you want to do is to add in a notional packing cost per order then split that additional cost between all the items and look at the profitability of the items on the order.

Ah but... if someone buy 144 of something then it is just one big outer box, if they buy 140 it is 140 separate items so a lot more expensive to pick.. so what you need is a way to add in a picking cost to each order as well...

And so it goes on. The more answers you get the more questions you ask.

quite often we are interested not in what people are buying but what they are not buying. If we know what they are not buying then we can pitch that item to them and chances are good they might take it.

So what you really need is not an answer to your question but an answer to all your questions.

The answer to this, I think, is to use a dataset made in a spreadsheet linked to the order items in Sage through ODBC and then run pivot tables on the data set.

Indeed the dataset might have loads of extra columns in it, to get the size of the items or their weight or the pack size or location form the stock table.

If you use pivot tables already you will know just how quickly you can flex the data and ask different questions, view in different ways and get answers to different questions.