Looking for lost orders? We have the reports for you!

So, it's gearing up to that busy time of year - don't worry, we won't mention the big C Holiday until at least Halloween has passed ... Regardless, the time is approaching and you may want to tie up some lose ends and get all your ducks [orders] in a row before giving your undivided attention to what is hopefully everyone's busiest selling season.

To access the variety of orders reports available at your fingertips, hit 0 for Reports and then 4) Orders Reports - the possibilities are endless here, really, so we will just talk about the last three on here, as those will help you deal with anything that hasn't yet arrived and will hopefully help you figure out why!

d) No-show orders now past their cancel date
When you place an item on order, a cancellation date is automatically placed into that entry - that date is pulled from whatever default you have set up in your supplier file - unless you override that and put in a longer date manually.

This report will scan the orders file and insert a CNW [cancel no word] in the status field. You will of course want to address these items and deal with any re-orders you may need to do. This report is linked to a routine you can add in your scheduler: 10 Scan Orders for entries past cancel date. We have Mosaic's scheduled to go every Monday night, so feel free to add this routine to your overnight/weekly events if it isn't already there. You will see two entries in your Reports Directory when you start BookManager up the next day - CANCLORD.TXT and CANCL_SO.TXT - you can print those from here just by arrowing down to each line, and hitting P for Print.

Also, this report is automatically updated as part of the month-end routine, but, we do suggest you schedule it to run on a weekly basis - its an easy and efficient way to stay on top of your orders - so just add it to the Scheduler and let BookManager take care of it! Of course, you can manually update the report at any time, simply by hitting U to Update. And keep in mind, anything that appears on this report will have it's status changed to cancelled and no further reminders will be issued.

e) Slow arrivers (orders not yet received)
A lot of you are doing EDI/electronic ordering so you are able to receive acknowledgments and confirmations which let you know right away the status of your orders. However, some vendors may not do EDI, or sometimes you may have to telephone/email/fax in orders for a different circumstances - and in these cases, unless you received verbal confirmations at the time the order was placed, the status of these items will remain simply as SENT. Sometimes orders get lost by the vendor, or some new releases had their publication date pushed back. In situations like this, it is easy for items to fall through the cracks and before you know it, three, four months has passed and you still haven't received those orders! So, this report will let you keep your eye on that!

Press U to Update and you will see you have a few more options for tweaking the report than the previous one. What's nice about that, is say you have a Puzzle vendor who you always email your orders to, you can just type in their code to get a report just on their orders. Of course, if you want to stay on top of all your vendors, leave that field blank and on you go! So this report will look at orders that were placed on/or before the time period you specified and that haven't had their statuses updated to a BackOrder.

REPORT TIP!
Sure, we all love printing pages AND PAGES of reports [Shhhh, don't tell David Suzuki!] And of course, using a ruler and highlighter is great and nothing beats that gratification of crossing something off with a squeaky black sharpie, buuuuuuuuuuut, you can save yourself the time of manually keying ISBN's by working right off the screen - this way you get to see your inventory screen, sales, order history, etc. So, after you have updated any report, just arrow down to the first ISBN on the screen and type V for View and BAM, you are looking at your list of lost orders, while still being able to see your inventory history. You can quickly "toggle" over to Orders just by hitting the #1 and it will take you to that exact order record you were reviewing. Once you have re-ordered, or changed the status, simply type #0 and it will take you RIGHT BACK to your place in the orders report you were working on. Magic huh?

f) S/O slips from no-show orders
This report is automatically updated when you run the d) No-show orders now past their cancel date and cannot be updated on it's own. Since the "no show" report looks at cancel dates, it updates any special orders as well. You will want to deal with these ASAP as they are customer requested orders and by golly, you have a reputation to uphold!