Reviewing your sales information

Business Insights presents a summary of your sales and customer information, including which customers owe you money and how much money is overdue. You can also see how much your customers owe you for each ageing period, as well as the sales history of your customers.

To find information specific to your needs, sort the table columns by clicking a column heading. For example, you can sort the list of outstanding invoices to find the most overdue invoice or the largest overdue amount.

See Business Insights—Overview for more information.

1. Click Business Insights in any command centre. The Business Insights window appears.

2. Click the Customer Analysis tab.
   
   This tab shows you:

   • the total you are owed and details of each overdue customer payment (based on their invoiced credit terms), including the number of days overdue

   • your top ten customers by year-to-date sales value

   • the amounts owing for each ageing period

   • a summary of your customer sales and payment history.

   
   You can use this information to:

   • Contact customers for overdue payments Identify which customer payments are the most overdue or which customers owe you the most money.

   • Renegotiate a customer’s credit terms View the customer’s outstanding balances and payment history, such as the average number of days it takes for them to pay you.

3. If you want to use one of the graphs or tables in another document, right-click it and choose:

   • Copy to Clipboard. This copies the graph or table to the clipboard, ready to paste into a document.

   • [Graphs only] Save As. Choose where you want to save the image and click Save. This saves the graph as an image file, so you can use it later.

4. If you want to customise the look of Business Insights, click Customise. The Customise window appears, enabling you to show or hide information in Business Insights.

1. Click To Do List in any command centre. The To Do List window appears.

2. Click the Accounts Receivable tab. A list of all unpaid sales appears.
   The Overdue column shows the number of days an invoice is overdue. (A negative number in the Overdue column indicates that the payment is not yet due.) The number of days an invoice is overdue is calculated by checking the original date of the invoice, comparing it to today’s date and looking at the customer’s credit terms.

3. If you want to send a collection letter to customers with overdue payments:

   1. Select those customers by clicking in the select column (  ).

   2. Click Mail Merge to create the letter directly in Microsoft Word. Otherwise, click Disk to save a mail merge file that you can use in another word processor.

There are several sales reports that can help you track your sales activities. For example, you can run an Aged Receivables Summary report to view your customers’ current balances sorted by ageing periods. The Sales Item Summary report shows you which items are selling best. The Referral Source report is useful for finding out which referral source is bringing your business the most money.

1. Go to the Reports menu and choose Index to Reports. The Index to Reports window appears.

2. Click the Sales tab. A list of available sales report groups appears.

3. Click a group category to view the available reports.

For information on displaying, customising and printing your reports, see Reports.

You can view sales history for an item, customer, or employee (Not Basics).

1. Display the Item Information window for an item or the Card Information window for a customer or an employee.

2. Click the History tab. The History tab displays seven years of sales history for the item or card: the five years preceding the current financial year (as displayed in the Company Information window), the current financial year and the next year.