Tip of the Month for: January 2013

The all new Executive Information Center

The Executive Information Center is a management level tool that provides the information you need for tracking your business performance in one, convenient, easy-to-use program.  Each tab in the program provides a wealth of information on different aspects of the daily business.  Compiling this information into a single, easy-to-use program makes finding the information you need on a daily basis simple and straight-forward.

Current Bookings and Sales - This tab lists the new sales orders keyed in today, so you can see at a glance the amount of new "sales" entered.  This tab also lets you review the sales orders entered as "new" orders yesterday, or for any date range.  There is also a summary by warehouse, as well as invoice totals.  Sales orders can be sorted in order by sales dollars, gross margin dollars, or gross margin percent.

Sales Opportunities - This tab lets you quickly review outstanding quotes.  Quotes can be sorted by a "classification" type so that you can quickly review sales opportunities available in different areas of your business.  Quotes can also be sorted by sales dollar and gross margin dollar, by salesman and by warehouse.  Filtering options let you specify the types of quotes you want to see so that you can be sure you are viewing the high sales dollar or gross margin dollar opportunities for your business.

Hot List Customers - Keep track of the customers you need to concentrate your collection efforts on.  This tab lets you see priority customers, account balances, late amounts, and collection effort history.

Critical Backorders - This tab lets you focus on the sales orders you are currently unable to invoice customers for because you are waiting on one or more backordered items.  You can see each order, the total sales value of the order, as well as the number and value of the items on backorder.

All of the above tabs provide integration with the Task Reminders in Answers so that you can see per order and per quote which items have scheduled follow-up calls, as well as the history of calls already made for that order or quote.  You can set up new Task Reminders for any item from the above tabs, as well as instantly message the salesperson with direct questions about the orders or quotes you are reviewing.

Salesperson Performance - This tab gives you a simple way to review your salespersons sales and gross margin totals.  Also, if your salespeople have expense accounts set up, you can see an individual salesperson Profit and Loss Statement to easily track their actual profit after expenses.

Vendor Performance - This tab summarizes each vendor's performance.  You can see your total 12 months sales and gross margin for each vendor, total amount of inventory on-hand, slow-moving or dead items for each vendor, as well as lost sales and current open purchase orders.

Financial Position - This tab gives you real-time, current totals for all your important cash flow figures such as Cash, Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable, open Purchase Orders, open Payables, and open sales orders.  This tab also provides a current Income Statement with a single click. 

The Executive Information Center is located on the General Ledger, Inquiry menu.  During the first use of the workcenter, the user will be asked which Financial Statement they typically want to see on the Financial Position tab, as well as how the Inventory value should be calculated.  Users will also want to ensure that the Vendor Performance Calculations and the Customer Hot List Generation are enabled in the nightly processing (System Management > Answers Software Management > Batch Processing Data Entry > Daily Tasks).