Updating Customer Sales Accumulators

There are several fields in the Customer Master which are used to store or accumulate sales totals for each customer.  These fields are output on many of the reports produced by the system including the Customer Ranking reports.  Some of these accumulators are maintained automatically by the system and are only cleared out at the end of each fiscal or calendar year while others are not automatically updated by the system and should be loaded with the appropriate information on a regular basis (please see the Application Note on Trend Analysis for more information on customer and inventory sales accumulators).  The following procedure is used at the end of each year or period to load each accumulator with the appropriate sales totals.

1. Determine what information is to be maintained in each of the customer sales accumulators.  There are 5 (five) different accumulators which are used to store customer sales statistics.  They are listed below.  Each of these accumulators may be rebuilt as required using the Build Company Master Accumulators program.  The following section describes each accumulator and how it is updated by the system (if applicable).

•    Sales YTD - This field stores the net amount of accounts receivable for each customer in the current fiscal or calendar year.  This field is updated by the invoicing program (incremented or decremented) each time an invoice is created for the customer.  The field is updated with the subtotal amount from each invoice (translated into house currency if the invoice was created in a currency different than house currency).  Normally this field should be cleared and rebuilt (as described later in this section) only at the end of your fiscal or calendar year (or at the beginning of the next fiscal or calendar year).  This ensures that the total of this field in each customer record includes only the sales made during the current year.

•    Last Year - This field stores the net amount of accounts receivable for each customer generated during the entire prior fiscal or calendar year.  The field should be loaded at the end of each year (or at the beginning of the new year) with the invoice dates from the entire prior fiscal or calendar year as desired by your company.  This field is not updated automatically by the system and should only need to be cleared and rebuilt once per year.

•    Last Year 2 - This field stores the net amount of accounts receivable for each customer generated during the fiscal or calendar year immediately preceding Last year.  The field should be loaded at the end of each year (or at the beginning of the new year) with the invoice dates from the entire fiscal or calendar year prior to Last Year as desired by your company.  This field is not updated automatically by the system and should only need to be cleared and rebuilt once per year.

•    Last Year 3 - This field stores the net amount of accounts receivable for each customer generated during the entire fiscal or calendar year immediately preceding Last Year 2.  The field should be loaded at the end of each year (or at the beginning of the New Year) with the invoice dates desired by your company.  This field is not updated automatically by the system and should only need to be cleared and rebuilt once per year.

•    Trend Sales - The Trend accumulator is used to provide comparative information between periods.  The information which is maintained in this field may be customized to meet the needs of your business but it will normally be used to show sales trends as outlined in the Application Note on Trend Analysis (please see this appnote for more detail about this field).  For example, the Trend field may be loaded each month with sales for the preceding 12 months to provide a comparison between Last Years Sales (all 12 months) vs. sales over the last 12 months (some of which may be from last year).  Another way to use the Trend field is to load it with YTD sales from the prior year (for example if run a calendar year business and on June 1st 1994 you loaded Trend with sales from 1/1/93 - 5/31/93 you would be able to compare current Sales YTD (1/1/94 - 5/31/94)  - which is maintained by the system to sales for the same period in the prior year (1/1/93-5/31/93).  How you decide to maintain the Trend field at your company is up to you but it is important to note that the system does not update the Trend field and that this field usually will need to be updated at the end of each period.

2.  Determine which customer sales accumulators need to be updated at the end of the current period and what data needs to be loaded into them.

3.  Update the appropriate accumulators using the Build Customer Master Accumulators program. - Once you have decided which accumulators should be updated, you should rebuild the accumulator(s) by selecting the  Build Customer Master Accumulators program from the menu and by inputting the appropriate accumulator number and  invoice date range,  Note: The Build Customer Master Accumulators program can also be set up to run automatically in the Job Processor.  This task is normally performed by your system administrator as the timing and duration of the job can affect items like the system backup and the running of other critical time sensitive jobs.

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