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

hi i am running UK version of sage50 accounts v.26.2. I am a newbie to it and i need to identify who our top customers are in terms of sales in the last 24 months. I then want to go on and identify the top customers in terms of profit over the same period. any help at all would be a godsend.
kind regards
gav

"By Sales" I assume this means sales turnover.

If your company is new to sage, you probably do not have 24 months of data.

Hi Bruce - our company is not new to sage I am. We have used it for years. However, i am trying to use it to do some data analysis to make our sales and marketing more efficient. I have used it a little over the last year. There was a previous person in post who used to compile all manner of reports. I just want to do something I think will be relatively simple as per my question, Hope that makes sense.
Regards
Gav

Thanks for that clarification.

The way I would do this is to create a linked excel spreadsheet that has the data from the invoicing module in it, you could then use this to create pivot tables in excel to analyse the information over any period, analysing it against products, customers, date ranges, whatever you want.

The trouble with that is that is it is beyond a quick and easy tutorial on a forum. If you wanted to hire me it would take about half an hour to build the sheet on your pc and give you a quick run through, if you have not used pivot tables before than allow an extra 15 mins so I can walk you through using them to. (If you want to learn how to modify the sheet to add more data and link in other tables then allow a further 30 mins.) These are rough and ready estimates, if you are not very used to Excel, then they will be an under estimate, if you are an excel wiz then they are an over estimate, My current rate is £72.60 per hour + VAT. (If you are on an old version Sage and a new version of Excel then there are some potential issues we should talk about first give me a ring and have a chat)

If you want to write a report, you cannot write one using the data in the customer record, this only goes back a year. So no good for your application.

You would need to use the data in the invoicing module.

To do this, you need to have the invoice table as the detail section and then add up all the invoices for each customer in a customer footer section, you will need a criteria for the date range of invoices and you will want to hide the details section as you don't want the details of each invoice in your report.

The issue with this is that the customers grouping will list them in account order. Not in the total sales value for the period. So still not a good outcome, hence my first suggestion. There is an advanced method of getting total, before the report is output, this is one of the really badly documented features of Sage 50 that even I have had issues with, again, probably more than one could address in a simple forum and it will only give you one report, you have to do a separate one for the profitability and so on. (The Excel approach is the better all round solution.)