I know all you bookkeeping types think marketers just sit around making pretty pictures and dreaming up catchy sayings. The marketers think bookkeepers sit in a back room somewhere adding and re-adding the same column of numbers over and over. The truth is the two of you need to meet, even if you are the same person.
Effective marketing is more about understanding the inventory, cost, sales and customer data than pretty images. Good bookkeeping is about keeping track of data that is useful to running a business. You can use some of the tools in Outright to merge bookkeeping and marketing data very easily.
Log into your company on Outright and go to the Reports Tab. Be sure you are on the Profit and Loss reports which will be the default report that comes up. In the upper left hand corner you will see the drop down where you select a time period for your report, select annual. You should now see four columns with your profit and loss statements for the current year, two prior years and next year. Scroll to the bottom of the page and there are two links. The first says “export report” and the second says “export transactions”. Select the export transactions under the current year.
Outright exports all of this year’s transactions to a comma delimited file. You can open this file in Excel, Google Spreadsheet or OpenOffice. When you open the file all of your sales transactions will be listed first followed by your expense transactions. For our purposes today, we are going to focus on sales, so delete all the rows with expense transactions.
What you should now have is a spreadsheet with all of your sales transactions year to date with the date, customer name, description of the transaction, sales category and amount of each sale. You can highlight all of this data and use the database functions in your spreadsheet to sort your information by customer, date, sales category or amount. You can also subtotal the entire report by any of those columns. If you are really creative, add a day function to your spreadsheet that calculates the day of the week based on the dates that are already in your database to find how what your good revenue days are.
Now you have some great marketing data to better understand where, how and when your revenue is earned. Of course, all this great marketing information is only as good as what was entered to begin with. Next time you are entering sales, channel your inner bookkeeper and take the time to input accurate and meaningful information.
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