Why "by Month"?
We've had Smart Sales in FurnishWEB for some time now. FurnishWEB accumulates data from shipments/invoices by dealer and product for historic reporting. Since we introduced Smart Sales the reports have shown annual data in a comparison format with columns for quantities and dollars for LAST_YEAR, LAST_YEAR_TO_DATE, and THIS_YEAR_TO_DATE. Sales managers and sales reps have praised this addition to FurnishWEB, but (yes, there's almost always a "but") ... but, they'd like to also see this data by monthly buckets in addition to annual buckets.
I'd say that this has been the most requested enhancement to FurnishWEB by the sales reps over the past year.
Well, the wait is over! Smart Sales now reports, prints, and downloads data with a monthly option.
Slice & Dice!
In adding the new monthly options, we decided to go ahead and improve the drop-down options and performance allowing more options to Slice & Dice the data.
- Sales Managers and company Owners can now run product reports that are company-wide instead of one sales rep territory at a time.
- Speed and performance are vastly improved by a new method for sorting and paging through all the records.
- Drop-down options have been added for sales reps and staff to select individual dealer account to review detailed trending without having to go to the Dealers tab and drill down.
- And more ....
Future?
Wow... the options are endless for the future of this data. We see charts and graphs, searching, more options to slice & dice, and maybe a new visual option of the data. We'll get feedback from our great user base on this latest upgrade and go from there. Just like we always do!
8 responses so far ↓
1 Lorne Rotenberg // Dec 4, 2010 at 4:59 PM
getting information in the same time frame makes it much more user freindly
2 Bob Gilbert // Dec 6, 2010 at 9:46 AM
3 Barry Welch // Dec 6, 2010 at 10:15 AM
Thanks for your post and an excellent point. When we built FurnishWEB we made a decision to accumulate and store sales history by calendar month as this was the most universally understood model and ship_date was a field that could be supplied by virtually any accounting system.
We understand that some companies choose to create fiscal accounting periods that are different from calendar months. And, more importantly, we understand that those companies create sales quotas for their sales reps based on those fiscal periods.
FurnishWEB was not created as an accounting program or meant to directly support quotas or designed to calculate commissions. All of these are very important, just not part of the initial mission of FurnishWEB.
Unfortunately, it will be a challenge to modify FurnishWEB to support multiple possibilities for fiscal periods. We will talk about this within our team and see if there is a creative answer.
4 Barry Welch // Dec 6, 2010 at 10:18 AM
Thanks for your post. I hope these new additions to Smart Sales are beneficial to you.
5 John // Dec 8, 2010 at 5:49 PM
6 Chip Leesemann // Dec 8, 2010 at 8:28 PM
FW keeps getting better and better!
Thanks,
Chip
7 Barry Welch // Dec 8, 2010 at 9:39 PM
8 Barry Welch // Dec 8, 2010 at 9:39 PM
How the heck are you? Thanks for the comment. I just knew you'd like this update.
Hope you have a Merry Christmas.
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