While I don't like this screen, because of its lack of drilldown, I have a client whose owner uses it daily to eyeball sales trends, by month and by year. All he really looks at are the Net Sales, Cost of Sales and Profit % rows.

The company recently opened up a second warehouse, and he would like to see the information by location.

I have tried every which way, using SalesAnalysis Inquiries and GridView, to reproduce this information for a location, without success. There is just no way to generate the information in a reasonable time frame, not with a million sales transactions, and even when generated, the presentation is not nearly as good as the standard screen.

How can I satisfy this reasonable request?

Steve

Hi Steve,

So is your comment that the Sales Statistics for a specific location cannot be done, or that it just doesn't work as fast? I suspect the latter.

Any custom inquiry or report will never be as fast because there is so much less underlying data for the Statistics. We don't store much detailed information here, so that it will be fast and can be presented in the way it is.

For a database that has a million transactions, you might have to do a customized view that generates overnight and that your client's investigation happens on this summary snapshot of the data, rather than 'live' data. Perhaps the next release of GridView can be helpful. It will be able to export Adagio records to an ODBC compliant database or MySQL, even overnight in the same way as Excel Direct works. So searching on a data snapshot in that environment might help satisfy the speed requirements.

Hi Softrak

I don't want to create a customized view at all. Besides the slowness, the output is not as nice as the standard inquiry, what with the options to change from monthly to annual, and to scroll thru different periods almost instantaneously.

Consider this a request to filter the standard inquiry screen by location.

Steve

Hi Steve,

This form is generated from a daily summary file which is not maintained by location.

GV will be the only way to get where you client is trying to get to in the foreseeable future.

Sorry.

I figured, because I know how the data is stored.

But to a non-techie like my client, it seems like a very reasonable request and his reaction to my initial "no" was that Adagio was not very location friendly.

Steve

Hello Steve,

Since you know how the data is stored, I'm sure that you could build a GridView workspace that would store the same data by location in an Excel Workbook and use that as a data source to satisfy your client's request.

But why stop at location? Off the top of my head, I can imagine wanting to look at those statistics by:

• Category
• Customer
• Salesperson
• Territory
• Customer Report Group
• Item
• Item Report Group
• AR Control Account
• Billing Cycle
• IC Control Account
• and I'm sure there are a bunch more if we threw in the optional fields

If we kept all of these numbers available on the off chance they might be useful, the size of the database would explode, as would the processing time to retrieve data into SalesAnalysis.

Like your client, I'm in that screen almost every day. I use GridView for looking up specific numbers that interest me. Michael has a Workspace that displays the month's sales comparatives as a bar chart as well as highlighting daily sales trends.

Everyone's specific needs for the data that SalesAnalysis stores are different. That's why the module supports Ad hoc Inquiries and GV Workspaces attached to the Inquiries menu.

Hi Andrew

Turns out that client showed me up and suggested a way to do it that I would have never thought of - through the Ledger!!

The Ledger keeps monthly/annual statistics on sales and cost of sales by location, assuming the IC location is defined to point to a department. That's what the net activity figures are.

So I am going to use either GridView or Financial Reporter to give him exactly what he needs.

Regards

Steve

Perfect!