Sales Analysis

Simple Sales Report

All sales analysis start with Net Sales & Profit analysis.

To make a report like the one on the right, you don’t need a lot of time. A BI developer can build it - using Microsoft SQL Server Report Builder – in just 4 hours.

But there is a lot more to BI4Dynamics than just this simple report. It has features that every company wants, but cannot find them within Microsoft Dynamics NAV.

Year to Date

Every Dynamics NAV user that has spent at least a few hours in accounting or sales knows that values are very often analyzed by Year-To-Date.

If we look at the report over a period of time, we can easily compare our Net Sales this year with the one from last year.

At the same time we can also calculate a YTD index, which shows us what was the difference between a cumulative Net Sales in a specific period of time.

Salesperson Analysis

In this example we are evaluating our sales personnel. We can clearly see that John is the most successful. He has the highest Net Sales – over 3 million - and he makes a good profit.

Mary and Richards sales are close together. But if we look closely, we see Richards’ profit is 5% higher. This is due to the fact that he gave fewer discounts.

And if we look at the net sales YTD Index, we see that Richard also has a higher Sales growth. Knowing this makes it clear that Richard is our #2.

Sales Budgets

One of the supported features in BI4Dynamics are also Sales Budgets.

Here is an example for one Customer by Sport Product Group. By drilling down, we can see all Items by Budget Quantity and Budget Sales Amount

Seasonal Aspects of Sales

Standard reports only have one Date Dimension. This allows you to see the trend over certain period of time, but doesn't show you the seasonal aspect of your business.
 
In BI4Dynamics NAV we have added a separate independent Date Dimension to cover seasonal aspect.

From the report we can see there were some variations in the first two years, specially in 3rd quarters, but the sales got more balanced further on.

Sales by Type

Standard reporting in Microsoft Dynamics NAV is designed to get data from only one ledger entry! In Inventory we can analyze Sales by Item; Resources in Resource Ledger Entry; etc.
 
In Dynamics NAV we cannot analyze all these types in one standard report. Of course the report can be created, but the problem is, that we don’t have one super ledger entry. BI4Dynamics NAV easily soloves this reporting gap (click on the image to see the report).
 
It is important to understand that BI4Dynamics NAV takes data directly from ledger entries and not from posted sales lines (posted documents).

Bill-to, Sell-to, Ship-to

In Microsoft Dynamics NAV "Bill to" customer is available in receivables, "Sell to" customer is available in the sales area, and "Ship to" Name/Code is available only in delivery notes.

BI4Dynamics NAV makes is possible to analyze sales by any customer information.

In the report we see that our customer has 3 subsidiaries and the first subsidiary has more shops (locations) which are tracked by different ship-to address.

Sales Dashboard

Dashboard (designed and running in Microsoft Office Excel) covers the sales analysis over selected period of time. We have reports over Top Customers, Top Countires, etc.

In the back we can set up filters which will apply for all reports on our dashboard.