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.

Standard

Navigate to "Analyze" > "Sales" > "Customers". 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:

You can toggle between Sales and Receivables, choose between a standard and multi-period view, download your report, or select the stars icon for AI insights.

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:

Under Receivables, you will see a table detailing the receivables by customer per time bucket. You can drill down into the details by clicking on any customer's name.

You can also see a neat summary of key information at the top of the screen in the summary cards.

You can narrow your view according to:

Or group your contacts according to FX exposures. You can see the FX rates at the bottom of the table.

You may wonder why Syft's aged receivables (AR) and aged payables (AP) reports differ to Xero's. Syft uses its own methodology to create these reports since:

In this section, we explain our methodology for calculating AR and AP reports, outline aging options available to you, and highlight a few common differences between Xero's old reports, Xero's new reports, and Syft.

Generally speaking, Syft's methodology for creating an AR or AP report follows three steps:

Steps 1 and 2 are simple, and if it weren't for Step 3, all reports would align. The challenge with Step 3 is that it includes payments that can't be associated with journals, such as overpayments, pre-payments, partial payments, payments without assignment to contacts, and all of the aforementioned, with or without returns. This results in differences between Xero's old reports, Xero's new reports, and/or Syft.

For Step 3, Syft attempts to allocate unassigned payments using the date of the transaction. If we can't do this, Syft allocates the payment to the oldest time bucket. However, since there are several types of transactions in Step 3, this approach won't always align with how Xero approaches it.

The standard aged method is a calendar-based approach to receivables and payables. The aged buckets are Current month, last month, 2 months prior, 3 months prior, and 4 months or above.

Below are a few differences you may notice between Xero's old reports, Xero's new reports, and/or Syft, along with steps to align them.

If you change a contact name in Xero, it won't update in Syft. Xero doesn't allow us to fetch changes to contacts; it only allows us to fetch the entire list of contacts. Since we're updating transactions daily, re-fetching the entire contact list would slow down refreshes. However, Syft automatically fetches new contacts. If you'd like to fetch changes to historical contacts, contact a Customer Success Manager and we'll re-fetch all the data for your entity. This will take a few minutes and resolve the issue. We will make a change to avoid this in the future.

This occurs when you backdate payments and invoices in Xero. As a rule of thumb, posting an invoice in Xero several years ago may lead to reconciliation issues. Reach out to a Customer Success Manager and we'll re-fetch all the data for your entity. This will take a few minutes and will resolve the issue.

Since Xero doesn't share their AR and AP methodology, we don't know how they allocate overpayments, pre-payments, partial payments, payments without assignment to contacts, and all of the aforementioned, with or without returns. A further complexity is the date to use, either the invoice date, the payment date, or the expected date. This results in differences between Xero's old reports, Xero's new reports, and/or Syft. Because of this, certain transactions aren't in the same time bucket, and, unfortunately, there is no way to align them.

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:

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:

Within the "Multi-Period" view, you can select the number of periods to view from the period dropdown.

All sales tools can be used for the standard and multi-period view within "Analyze" > "Customers" and "Analyze" >"Products" unless otherwise stated.

You can filter each of the columns within the Customers and Products tables by hovering next to the name of the column and on clicking on the funnel icon.

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.

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.

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:

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.

You are able to select comparison periods between versus prior period or versus prior period last year.

You are also able to select whether you want to view the data in the tables in a number format ("#") or a percentage format ("%").

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.

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.

Other common causes of sales outliers include:

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.

You are able to download the Customer and Products information by clicking on the "Download" button in the top right hand corner of the screen, which provides a variety of download options.

Syft Assist AI provides you with a variety AI options, including generating insights, creating a summary for an email, suggesting ways to improve, and explaining the feature to you. It also allows for downloads to PDF with AI, or Word with AI. The "Settings" option allows you to select the Syft AI Assist language.

You can also select Syft Send to generate AI-powered summaries and alerts.

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!

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:

You can also see how customers have trended over time using the multi-period view.
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