Starting the New Year with Sage 100
When starting the new year, it’s very common for people to take a look back at the previous year and begin to do some planning. What we typically find is that our customers use Sage 100 on a day to day basis for common business tasks. For example:
Checking inventory levels
Checking for orders that need to ship
Answering customer questions about when their order can ship.
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Less often, we see customers looking at the analysis reports that are offered out of the box. A few clients have come up with their own analysis reports because they have intrinsic business knowledge about their company. However, we find that most do not look at the out of the box Sage reports as even a starting point.
These canned reports — even though they may not be perfect for your needs — can be massaged, tweaked, and modified using things like user defined fields and Crystal Reports. We want our customers to feel comfortable using these reports so that you can identify yearly, quarterly, monthly, and seasonal trends in your business much more quickly. There are almost a dozen reports we feel our clients should be using and we are going to touch on some of the more important ones below.
The Inventory Sales History Report
There is an inventory sales history report by period which shows each month broken out by sales, quantities, dollars, gross profit, and cost of goods sold. You can use this report to find your slow periods. This report becomes even more valuable when you pair it with the customer sales analysis report (listed below).
Customer Sales Analysis Report
The customer sales analysis reports allow you to see your business by period and determine where your customers slow down. Do they buy less in the summer months? Is there seasonality built into the majority of your customer’s businesses? You can answer these questions with the customer sales analysis report. As an added benefit, you can also pull this report by salesperson to help identify a correlation between a slow buying period and a dip in sales by someone on the team.
Vendor Purchase Analysis
Turning the tables a bit, we have the vendor purchase analysis report. You can use this report to analyze your vendors and see where you spent the most money last year, your year to date purchases, and your purchases by period. Spotting trends using this report will help with cash flow management, especially when paired with the customer sales analysis report.
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Some Sage 100 customers are not aware that these reports exist. Generally speaking, when we train people at Ardent Consulting, we train them on how to find the reports, run them, and do some quick analysis. There is a good bit of information beyond the high level analysis we discussed in this article.
If you do one thing today, do yourself a favor and check out some of the canned reports that are automatically included with Sage 100. You might discover something about your business that helps you refine your annual planning process.