[RetailEdge Moderator]

Now that you have been using the program and have generated lots of sales, receiving, order and inventory data, how do you view the information you need to make future decisions?

Here are a few tips on:

Filtering,
Memorizing Reports, and
Exporting Data
Report Filters

Common Report Questions

What is the difference between Quantity and Count?

The quantity of an item is quantity of the item sold, received, on order, or in inventory. A report will display a count column typically when there is some summarizing happening. For instance if you are running a Inventory Category Report By Department, you will see a Quantity column (total number of items in that department) and a Count column (total number of SKUs in the Department).

What is the difference between a Deposit (Open Order) and a Sale?

An open order is not treated as a sale (where sales tax would be required to be collected) until 100% of the sale total has been collected. At that point the Open Order is converted to a sale and inventory is adjusted. Items on a Open Order are not removed from inventory but will be allocated and will affect your available inventory quantity. Available quantity will typically be used for things like web integrations to prevent selling of items that are on order or on layaway and are allocated to a particular customer.

Why is there a difference between the Deposit Total and Sales Total on a Closing Report?

Sales Totals are merchandise sales of taxable and non-taxable items. A sale is a posted transaction that will typically adjust inventory (stock items) at the time of posting. Taxable item sales are used to calculate sales tax collected at the time of sale. The Deposit Total is really used to calculate a drawer total at the end of the day on a closing report. It includes adjustments to the sales totals for payments taken and issued. For example payments against transactions like Layaways and Deposits (Open Orders) will affect your drawer total but will not effect sales. However, once all the payments have been taken on an Open Order or Layaway, the transaction is converted to a sale and sales tax will need to be collected an reported on. This will effect the Sales totals you see, but since the deposit will have been taken potentially on another day, you will see an adjustment made to the deposit total to offset this. In addition there are other transactions like gift card manual issuances and payouts that will effect your drawer total but not affect sales.

What do all these date filters mean?

Most reports will have some sort of date filter component. Sales reports will require a Date Range filter (sales for some period) and receiving reports have a Date Range filter (receiving for some period. The Date Range filter is relevant to the report being run.

Where a report has need for multiple filters, you may see multiple filters. For instance a Turn Rate Report (Compound Inventory Reports) shows Inventory Levels, what was received and what was sold for the selected Date Range filter. This report also has a Received Date Range and a Sales Date Range filter. This allows you to select different ranges for receiving and sales. For instance I might want to see how things are selling that I received in April for the following 3 months. So you would set a Received Date Range of April 1 - April 30, and a Sales Date Range of May 1 - July 31.

Some inventory reports have the ability to set an As Of Date. This would be your inventory Quantity Levels (Quantity Only) as of a particular date.

Some Gift Card reports also have an As Of Date filter so that you can see outstanding Gift Card balances as of a particular date.

Filter Tricks and Tips

Most reports, manager screens and export functions have filters to allow you to refine your searches and reports with filters. The filters are pretty self explanatory, but here are some filter tricks:

Multiple Filters Many times you want to see information on more than one item, date range, etc. RetailEdge will allow you to add the same filter type to the Current Filters multiple times. This allows you to do things like run sales reports for Item 1 AND Item 2 at the same time and can compare them on one report.
Filter Wildcards You can use the % and _ wildcard characters to further tailor your filters. Description = %Shirt will give you a report Shirt anywhere in the description text. Description = Sh_rt will give you descriptions of Short and Shirt, etc. For more on wildcards you can go here.

Memorized Reports

If you can't remember that report that you run just once at the beginning of the month, simply memorize it.

Open the Report Selector

Run the report
Press the Memorized Reports tab
Press the Save Last Report button.
Name it something you can remember.

Easy.

Exporting Data

We believe your data is yours to do whatever you want with it. So you can pretty much export any file in RetailEdge from the Tools menu. In addition there are tailored exports to allow you to take your data easily into programs like MailChimp (Customer - E-Mail) or UPS World Ship (Customer - Shipping Labels with Weight). If you don't see a report you want, you can usually export the data and then open it in Excel to sort and massage the data to your heart's content. If you like the format of our reports but just want to tweak it a little, there is an Export button on the Report Viewer that will allow you to export the report contents to Excel with or without the headers.