OK, we're back! After a couple of days heads down working with the development team on some awesome upcoming features, I'm resuming the series of blog posts about April's release. There's a lot of awesome stuff to cover, which is why I'm breaking it down into a few chunks. If you missed the previous posts, have a look at Inventory locations, Purchase order corrections and Inventory transfers. This post covers custom fields (recently added to the product listing) and sales reporting.
Let's take a look at custom fields first. Custom fields have been available in Brightpearl ever since the beginning; this release heralds a number of usability improvements as well as the introduction of custom field filters on the product listing (as you can see in the screen shot below). Brightpearl is already packed with more standard fields than you can shake a stick at - but there's always going to be something else that you want to store! There are a number of different types of custom field supported; Select list, Date, Text, Textarea, Yes/no and Numeric. You can add custom fields to the following:
- Customers
- Suppliers
- Products
- Sales orders
- Purchase orders
... as you can imagine the possible uses are endless! You can add custom fields to your document templates (sales, quotes, invoices, goods-out notes and purchase orders) using the PCF code, which lets you share the information with customers, contractors and suppliers. Recently we also introduced the ability to add product custom fields as columns on your order templates - read more about templates here.
If you find yourself regularly applying filters to a list of products, sales or customers you can add the filter to your favourites by clicking the link at the bottom left of the screen. Handy!
So, changing tack completely, let's take a look at another improvement to reporting that we've just introduced; "top products for a customer". A few weeks ago we upgraded many of the sales reports; adding more filters, columns and also made them faster. Find them all under the Reports :: Sales menu. From here you can see your top products, your top customers, most productive sales channel, most lucrative lead source, best-selling brands and many combinations of variables too. Powerful stuff - in fact I'll be going into more detail on the sales reporting in another blog post soon. In case you hadn't spotted it (I wouldn't blame you, it's pretty hidden) - here's how to see your top selling products for a certain customer. From the "mini tabs" (see the screen shot below), click "Sales by product" in the orders tab. Dead useful if you're preparing to make a visit to a client to sell the latest season's goods, negotiating new terms, deciding what to buy for next season (perhaps they are an international distributor of yours) ... the list goes on.
That's it for today; watch out for the final couple of blog posts about the April release coming in the next few days; Warehouse management and barcodes, and Running your stock take. If you've not yet signed up for email delivery of the blog - just click the link on the right and you'll get them straight to your inbox!