WebStore Tip: WebStore Spring Cleaning

Not sure about the rest of Canada, but this little city on the lake received some lovely sunshine and warmer weather this past weekend. Usually when that happens, people get in organization and “clean up” mode. Sooooo, we just want to take this time and encourage you do to a little WebStore cleaning!

There are a few areas on your site where you can upload images, or create various events or alerts and have long since expired, or of no use to you anymore. Have a gander at your Uploads, which can be found under the Setup tab. Some images, .pdfs, .docs, etc may be of use to you at a future date, but most likely you are viewing a bunch of files that were for a one-off event and are no longer needed. Take just a few moments to peruse this area and delete any files that you don’t see yourself using in the future. Simply click view to see what the file is and if it’s old news, you can go right ahead and hit delete. There is a last modified date column as well, which should provide some insight into the last time you actually used the file.

Another overlooked area is News/Events, found under the News menu. You very well may have some seriously old entries in here ranging from author signings, seasonal sales, promotions, and so on and so forth. At Mosaic, we have five pages of events – which means, we should really be not only eating our words, but doing some cleaning up of our own!

It feels good to hit the delete button and actually mean it, doesn’t it? Happy purging folks!

BookManager Tip: Fun With Supplier Sales Reports

There are many reasons why you might want to run a report that looks at the sales of items invoiced by a particular supplier. Perhaps you want to see if a particular line of items is selling better than other similar items. Or perhaps you are participating in a shared markdown program with a supplier and need to generate a report that pulls in the items you sold in a specific time frame that you received from them. The supplier sales/on hand report will give you this information, along with some options to filter out specific sales criteria.

One of the key differences between running a Custom Inventory Report (using a certain supplier to filter titles) and this Supplier Sales Report is that the Supplier Sales Report looks at the invoice history of an item, rather than the supplier field of the inventory card, to pull in items into the report. To clarify this, let’s pretend that a book called “I Love Cats” has been received from RAN and HCP in the past. A Custom Inventory Report will not know whether the copy you sold yesterday was the one from RAN or the one from HCP, because it looks only at the supplier fields in the inventory card, not the invoice history. If you were to run a Custom Inventory Report that had filters to “show me all of the items I have sold with a supplier of RAN” it might well pick up this item in the report (because the item was once received from RAN) even though the particular copy you sold was not received from RAN. In contrast, the Supplier Sales Report will examine the invoice history of the item as well as the sales history to determine which supplier exactly (given an assumption of “first in, first out”) sold you the book you sold. In addition, the Supplier Sales Report will be much more accurate in terms of the costs of items because it is looking at particular invoice details for each item, not simply an average cost of the item over time.

Let’s pretend you wanted to look at all sales done on items you received from RAN, and you want to show only those sales where you gave 20% off at the till (maybe you were running a promotion on some RAN titles in conjunction with a shared markdown, and you need the total sales in order to get the extra credit from RAN.)

Go into 0-Reports, then 5) Supplier Reports, then choose a) Supplier Sales/On Hand Report. <U>pdate the report if needed. Then adjust the criteria of this report as needed for your purposes:

In the background, BookManager will scan through your sales file and pull out all of the ISBNs sold during the period you specify. Then it will link the ISBNs to suppliers in order to pinpoint the supplier you are interested in. At the end of all of this, the report will be displayed, giving you extensive information about each ISBN sold, including:

• the qty sold
• retail price
• discount given in the sale
• the “after discount” sold price
• Profit Margin (PM) you made on that item
• invoiced price
• discount received from the supplier
• the “after discount” invoiced net price
• the class and title
• invoice date and number you received the item on
• the POS invoice it was sold on, the date of the sale, and the customer account number it was sold to.
  

WHEW! At the very bottom of the report are grand totals (with cents omitted).