Mapping Sales and Other Data

With commercial products such as Microsoft’s MapPoint (click here) and MapBusinessOnline.com (click here), mapping a company’s sales and other data, I suspect, is relatively easy.  With these products, and probably others, a small company, it seems to me, can, for a small cost, gain a lot of leverage from data that the company has in its accounting system.

A company’s accounting system often stores a lot of data that might be usefully mapped.  With the mapping, new insights can possibly be gained.  If the data, such as sales, and vendor and customer names, have address information (e.g. street, city, state, and/or zip codes) and the data can be exported to Excel, the data should be able to be mapped using a commercial product.

Besides showing the geographical concentrations of sales, customers, and vendors, other ways in which data out of the accounting system might be mapped include:

1.  Showing a sales representative’s territory and sales quantities;

2.  Showing optimal routes to drive from customer to customer locations (or potential customers, vendors, etc.);

3.  Showing where employees live, which might be useful in scheduling and perhaps other planning;

4.  Showing percentages of products sold in geographical areas;

5.  Showing quantities and names of inventory at various warehouse locations; and

6.  Comparing sales trends for more than one time period in geographical areas.

Maps showing the above information could well give new insights, and useful decisions, resulting from data (valuable data) already captured by the company.