Who can use this feature
Roles: Owner, Admin, Staff, Client, Investor and optional on custom roles
Plans: Available on Professional and Advanced
About Sales
Getting a clear visual sense of your sales data according to customers.
To find the Customers table, navigate to Analyze. Under Sales, you will find Customers and Products on the left menu bar. These tabs provide information about sales by customer and product.
The customers table looks at all customers in a table with key sales information across revenue, product, and discounts with comparison to prior periods. You can toggle between nominal values or percentages.
📓 Note
The tables within Customer and Product are based on invoice data from the provider. This means that the tables would not pull through as expected if the entity is set to cash basis, especially when the invoice is raised and paid in different periods. If the invoice is raised and paid in the same period, the table would pull through the data correctly.
Customers
Standard
Navigate to "Analyze" > "Sales" > "Customers" and click on the "Standard" top tab. Here, you will find a table that details customer sales information for any period that you select within the global date selector at the top of your page. The following metrics are displayed in your customer sales standard table:
Number of sales per customer
Number of unique products ordered by each customer
Total number of products ordered by each customer
Net revenue generated by each customer
Tax per customer
Discount value given to each customer
Refund value given to each customer
Amount due per customer
Average revenue per sale for each customer
Growth in sales per customer
Growth in revenue per customer
💡 Pro tip
When the entity is set to Accrual Basis, the invoice date is used. Cash Basis will only show the the invoice once the invoice has been paid.
Multi-period
Navigate to "Analyze" > "Sales" > "Customers" and click on the "Multi-Period" top tab. Here, you will find a table that details customer sales information across multiple periods. Select the type of period you would like to compare within the global date selector at the top of your page. You can choose one of the following metrics to measure and compare for your customers across multiple periods:
Number of sales
Unique items
Total items
Net revenue
Discounts
Refunds
Average revenue per sale
Products
Standard
Navigate to "Analyze" > "Sales" > "Products" and click on the "Standard" top tab. Here, you will find a table that details product sales information for any period that you select within the global date selector at the top of your page. The following metrics are displayed in your product sales standard table:
SKU (stock-keeping unit) per product
Product quantity sold
Number of unique customers buying that product
Net revenue generated by that product
Tax per product
Discount value given per product
Purchase cost per product
Gross profit per product
Growth in quantity sold for each product
Growth in revenue per product
Multi-period
Navigate to "Analyze" > "Sales" > "Products" and click on the "Multi-Period" top tab. Here, you will find a table that details product sales information across multiple periods. Select the type of period you would like to compare within the global date selector at the top of your page. You can choose one of the following metrics to measure and compare for your products across multiple periods:
Quantity sold
Unique customers
Net revenue
Discounts
Purchase cost
Gross profit
Within the "Multi-Period" view, you can select the number of periods to view from the period dropdown
Sales tools
All sales tools can be used for the standard and multi-period view within "Analyze" > "Customers" and "Analyze" >"Products" unless otherwise stated.
Filter
You can filter your customer and product data within the standard and multi-period view. by clicking on the filter dropdown, as shown in the image below.
💡 Pro tip
You can click on any column heading and it will filter the information from highest to lowest value for that metric.
Group
You also have the ability to group your sales metrics by specific tags or other groups. For instance, you may want to group customers by their payment status within the "Group by" dropdown, as shown in the image below.
Tags
Tagging your customers is useful as it enables you to assign certain customer data to account managers, locations, or value bands which makes it easier to segment the data set. Some examples of customer tags include:
Account manager: Assign account managers to each customer to track sales performance per manager
Location: Use location tags to group your sales data by region - either globally (e.g. UK) or regionally (e.g. New York).
Value: Tags such as "High value" or "VIP" help you keep track of the behaviour of your top customers
To assign a tag to a customer or product, hover over the customer or product line under the "Tags" column and click "Click to assign tag". You will be able to create a new tag or choose from a selection of pre-made tags.
💡 Pro tip
This information can be analyzed according to either a standard or multi-period view. Within multi-period view, you can also segment your data according to a specific variable, and you can switch on the option to detect outliers.
Outliers
The Customer and Product multi-period tables have a form of anomaly detection known as outliers. Enabling the detection of outliers means that Syft will filter and highlight numbers that are outside of 2.5 standard deviations from the mean (basically, values that are very different from the other values).
Click on the "Detect outliers" icon, highlighted in the image below. The outliers in your data will then be highlighted in red for you to investigate.
📓 Note
All values have a drill down functionality where you can click on the value and view the transactions that make up that value to investigate what makes up the total.
This can be useful when it comes to identifying unusual occurrences in your sales to prevent you from having false expectations inspired by these outliers. Once you have identified outliers in your sales data, it's worth investigating what happened in these cases and then perhaps excluding these from sales forecasts.
The most common cause of outliers is forced sales in response to shelf-life concerns. If a business decides to sell its products – say cheeses – at a lower market price so that they are all sold before they go off rather than having to dispose of this unsold stock, then this will create outliers in their sales data.
Causes of outliers
Other common causes of sales outliers include:
The addition of new customers
Disruptions in supply caused by increase in sales, breakdown of production equipment, delay in imports, lack of raw materials
Advance sales prior to an increase in price, a product shortage or a potential natural disaster which people may want to stockpile for
New competitors entering the market
Whatever the cause of the outlier, it's worth identifying and understanding why it happened so that you know what to do when planning for future demand. I hope you will find these features useful when it comes to analyzing sales and making decisions accordingly.
Stripe entity
Subscriptions
Navigate to "Analyze" > "Subscriptions" to analyze your subscription metrics by plan, by customer and take a look at customer activity. The functionality within "Analyze" is the same as the functionality within other "Analyze" tools mentioned in this article!
Invoices
You can find customer and product information in the "Analyze" section as a sub-tab. Here you can tag data according to regions, cities or specific customer verticals you sell to. Then, you can segment these by tag. For example, you could focus on a specific region to see how sales fared there compared to your other regions.
When it comes to product analysis, you are able to analyze:
Which products have I sold over the period
How many of each product have I sold over the period
How many of these products do I have on hand
What is happening with my product sales over time
You can also see how customers have trended over time using the multi-period view.