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.

Tracking Costs (and Revenues) Directly Related to a Product or Service in QuickBooks

Knowing as accurately as possible those costs (resources) that are required to produce a product or a service can be very useful in making decisions on producing the product and service.  Are you charging enough for the product or service?  Can the cost be reduced?  Knowing accurately the costs and revenues related to the product or service will make the answers to these questions more correct.

Accounting systems, such as QuickBooks, usually offer various ways of tracking costs.  For example, QuickBooks has a good method of associating costs with jobs (customers) and tracks well cost of inventory sold.  However, although knowing costs associated with jobs is useful in making decisions related to the jobs (and customer), such costs are not equal to product and service costs.  Also, the cost of inventory sold is not the full cost associated with a product. 

Two sets of costs, job and product/service, are useful and should be used in making decisions, one about customers and the other about products and services.  The nature and need for decisions made about customers and about products/services are different.

In QuickBooks, using the class feature allows for efficient and effective tracking of most, if not all, costs, including general operating costs such as marketing and training, required to produce a product or deliver a service.  Using the class feature leaves the job cost feature free for job costing.  A class list can be set up containing each product and service category that generates revenues.  With such a class list, the appropriate revenue category can be quickly selected at the line item level on both the sales form and the payment form.    The key to this process is being able to track revenues and costs by line item on the sales and purchase forms.  This means that single invoices, sales receipts, bills, and checks allow for the recording of multiple revenues and costs by class selection.  This greatly accounts for the efficiently and effectiveness of this tracking process.

Then, the profit and loss by class report will show what should be truer profits made on each product and/or service category, leading to better pricing and cost control changes.