communiqué V3 release notes

Overview for this release

With this release, we've added 8 new standard reports and 1 new Data Analyzers.  We added support for Inventory Sets and a SKUs filter tab for the data filters.  Communiqué now ships with more than 340 standard reports not including the 20 additional reports which come with the reconciliation modules.

General Enhancements or Fixes

• SKUs Filter Tab:  This new filter tab has been added to the remaining reports which can be filtered by SKU.  This feature allows you to import a list of SKUs in a *.csv file format to be used for filtering a report by the SKUs found in the import file.

• Inventory Sets:  Full support for creating and maintaining inventory sets have been added to any remaining report which can be filtered by SKU.

• Date Filters:  Week to Date (WTD), Month to Date (MTD) and Year to Date (YTD) date selectors have been added to the date selectors.  Though similar to This Week, This Month, and This Year, these new selectors end date will always be today.  This simplifies the selection if you want the end date for these periods to be today then use the new date selectors.

• Exclude Drop Ship SKUs filter option:  This new filter option will exclude any SKU related sale which was drop shipped instead of being shipped from you  warehouse.  The issue stems from the ability to change how you fulfill a SKU from your warehouse to a drop ship supplier.  These drop ships were included in sales reports since the SKU itself was not a drop ship SKU.

• Inventory Data Tab:  We added the "Not Like" operator so you can search for items not like the values entered for various inventory search fields.  This feature enhances the existing search capabilities by providing more flexibility in how you search for patterns in your data.

• Customers Data Tab:  We added the "Not Like" operator so you can search for items not like the values entered for various inventory search fields.  This feature enhances the existing search capabilities by providing more flexibility in how you search for patterns in your data.

• PayPal Reconciliation (PPR):  Extraneous commas in some transaction files would cause a load error.  This issue has been resolved for this release.

• On Order Options:  We've added On Order Options selector for most if the inventory fulfillment and replenishment reports.  The "Calculate Based on Supply Days" option will look at any item whose expected receive date falls within the supply days selected and uses this value as the on order amount.  The "Do Not Calculate" option does not consider the supply days and ignores the expected date, and calculates all expected quantities for an item regardless.

• Allocated Qty Calculation:  We've change the formula for this calculation and simplified it.  We now only count items from pending orders only.  Meaning any order which is not approved nor cancelled.  Calculating the allocated qty any other way was prone to error and impossible to quantify.

QOH Audit Utility

The QOH Audit utility is a new utility located in the Data Analyzers -> Inventory section.  This utility is designed as a simple and easy way to conduct inventory QOH audits and for accurately counting your physical inventory.  This utility works with a simple csv or text file containing scanned barcodes and optional counts.  By importing the scanned file into the utility, you are able to compare your scans to SEOM and make adjustments as necessary.  More come about this utility along with a webinar devoted to this topic coming soon.

New Themes and New Look

• Communiqué now sports the new Office 2013 look.

• 1 new theme have been added:

  Office 2013 White

   

New Reports

• Credits Issued: This report is located in the Financials -> Store Credits section.

• Credits Applied: This report is located in the Financials -> Store Credits section.

• Customer Sales by Date: This report is located in the Customers section.

• Intl Shipments by Item: This report is located in the Shipping section.

• Management by Assembly SKU: This report is located in the Inventory -> Assemblies section.

• Product Sales by Buyer: This report is located in the Sales -> Sales By section.

• Unapplied Credits by Customer: This report is located in the Financials -> Store Credits section.

• Unapplied Credits Order: This report is located in the Financials -> Store Credits section.

New Data Analyzers

• Customer Sales by Date: This report is located in the Customers section.

Report Enhancements and Fixes

A new Store Credits section has been added to the Financials sections.  You will find all of the store credit reports here.

Added a Cost of Goods column to the Sales -> Zero Dollar Sales report.  We also added a Payment Methods filter tab to the data filters for this report.

Removed the Financials -> Accounting Summary report.  It has been deprecated in favor of the Financials -> History -> Accounting Summary report.

The Purchase Orders -> Drop Ships -> Drop Shipped SKUs - Net Profit report issue with the sorting has been resolved in this release.  At times sorting by the Qty column would case an error.

The Email address has been added to the data set for the Orders -> Revised Order Listing report.  Some user were requesting this data element added so they can email to customers on this list.

The Sales - Coupons reports has the revised coupon data added to these reports.  When selected the Revised sales numbers option, the report would use the original coupon value instead.  This has been resolved with this release.

A Tracking Info section has been added to the Shipping Section.

The Shipping -> Order Tracking Info report has been renamed to Tracking Info by Order and moved to the new Tracking Info section.

Many more fixes and updates have been made to various reports reported by SEOM users.  Most of these are minor or cosmetic in nature and not significant to list individually.

Overview for this release

With this release, we've added 6 new standard reports and 12 new Data Analyzers.  We added support for Inventory Sets and a SKUs filter tab for the data filters.  Communiqué now ships with more than 340 standard reports not including the 20 additional reports which come with the reconciliation modules.

General Enhancements or Fixes

• Inventory Sets:  Full support for creating and maintaining inventory sets is now available in Communiqué.  Inventory Sets are similar to Categories in SEOM with the major difference being a SKU can be assigned to more than 1 Inventory Set.  Inventory Sets provide a way to be able to associate disparate SKUs together in a single set.  These sets can then be used for filtering various reports in Communiqué.

The Inventory Monitor will also be updated so you can use these Inventory Sets for monitoring purposes.  This update should be ready in about 2 weeks after this release so about the middle of June, 2013.

• SKUs Filter Tab:  This new filter tab has been added to the "Inventory Aging", "Inventory Value", "Inventory Value as Of" reports as of this release and will be added to more reports in future releases.  This feature allows you to import a list of SKUs in a *.csv file format to be used for filtering a report by the SKUs found in the import file.

The Inventory Monitor will also be updated with this capability so you can import a list of SKUs via a *.csv file to use for monitoring purposes.  The SKUs imported in this fashion will be monitored in addition to any SKUs defined with the Inventory Sets.

• Gross Margin (GM) vs. Profit issue:  With this release, we've renamed all columns labeled "Profit" with "GM" (Gross Margin).  There seemed to be some confusion about what the meaning of "Profit" in the SEOM context since the meaning of Profit is broad.  GM (Gross Margin) has a more narrow meaning at least when it comes to financial reporting, and its meaning better suits the calculations we use in Communiqué. 

The formula for calculating GM = (Product Sales - Cost of Goods).  We derive the Cost of Goods (COGS) from SEOM by multiplying the QuantityShipped * the CostPerUnit.  The Product Sales is derived from SEOM by multiplying the QuantityShipped by the PricePerUnit.  We do not include any other costs like shipping, freight, drop ship fees, etc. which may affect your profitability.  Whatever cost you enter in SEOM for the item, is the cost value we use for calculating your COGS for reports in Communiqué.  The formula for calculating GM% (Gross Margin Percent) is (Product Sales - Cost of Goods) / Product Sales.

 

In the case of reports using Revenue, we modify the GM formula to take into account shipping cost and subtract sales tax since the Revenue value includes Shipping collected from the customer and any sales taxes charged.  So the GM for Revenue is calculated as follows:  GM = Revenue - (Cost of Goods + Ship Cost + Sales Tax).  The formula for calculating GM% (Gross Margin Percent) for Revenue is (Revenue - (Cost of Goods + Ship Cost + Sales Tax) / Revenue).

 

To maintain continuity, we have not changed the report names.  So the Sales Summary - Net Profit report is still named the same, but the columns have been renamed as mentioned before.  We will be renaming these reports slowly but surely in the next few releases.  We will be changing the name from "Net Profit" to "Gross Margin" where applicable.

New Reports

• Sales Analysis by Brand: This report is located in the Sales -> Sales Analysis section.

• Sales Analysis by Category: This report is located in the Sales -> Sales Analysis section.

• Sales Analysis by Category Details: This report is located in the Sales -> Sales Analysis section.

• Sales Analysis by SKU: This report is located in the Sales -> Sales Analysis section.

• Sales Analysis by Supplier: This report is located in the Sales -> Sales Analysis section.

• Sales by Drop Shipped SKUs: This report is located in the Purchase Orders -> Drop Ships section.

New Data Analyzers

• Cohort Analysis - Monthly Order Counts: This report is located in the Data Analyzer -> Sales -> Cohort Analysis section.

• Cohort Analysis - Monthly Unit Counts: This report is located in the Data Analyzer -> Sales -> Cohort Analysis section.

• Cohort Analysis - Monthly Sales Summary: This report is located in the Data Analyzer -> Sales -> Cohort Analysis section.

• Cohort Analysis - First Time Buyers: This report is located in the Data Analyzer -> Sales -> Cohort Analysis section.

• Cohort Analysis - Repeat Buyers: This report is located in the Data Analyzer -> Sales -> Cohort Analysis section.

• Cohort Analysis - Weekly Order Counts: This report is located in the Data Analyzer -> Sales -> Cohort Analysis section.

• Cohort Analysis - Weekly Unit Counts: This report is located in the Data Analyzer -> Sales -> Cohort Analysis section.

• Cohort Analysis - Weekly Sales Summary: This report is located in the Data Analyzer -> Sales -> Cohort Analysis section.

• Sales Analysis by Brand: This report is located in the Data Analyzer -> Sales -> Sales Analysis section.

• Sales Analysis by Category: This report is located in the Data Analyzer -> Sales -> Sales Analysis section.

• Sales Analysis by SKU: This report is located in the Data Analyzer -> Sales -> Sales Analysis section.

• Sales Analysis by Supplier: This report is located in the Data Analyzer -> Sales -> Sales Analysis section.

Report Enhancements and Fixes

A new Sales Summaries section has been added to the Sales reports and the Hourly Sales Summary, Sales Summary, Sales Summary - Net Profit, Sales Summary - Adjustments Only reports were move to this section.  The Sales section was getting a bit long so we move these report into a new sub section to better organize this section.

Added Brand and Brand Name to the search descriptions for the Brand reports.  This includes not only the reports found in the Sales -> Brand section but any other report by Brand as well.

Added a Supplier filter to the Sales -> Sales By -> Sales by SKU report.

The Detail custom fields filter was not working properly.  This issue has been resolved with this release.

The "Source of Sales" filter tab was added to all of the Inventory Management reports to include the corresponding Data Analyzers.  More than 12 of these reports were updated with this capability.

Many more fixes and updates have been made to various reports reported by SEOM users.  Most of these are minor or cosmetic in nature and not significant to list individually.

Overview for this release

With this release, we've added 18 new standard reports.  Communiqué now ships with more than 330 standard reports not including the 20 additional reports which come with the reconciliation modules.  One new report in particular you may find interesting is the Inventory -> Inventory Value As Of and the Inventory -> Transaction Log reports.

General Enhancements or Fixes

• Order State Filter:  Full support for filtering orders by Order State is now available for most order based reports.  You can find this filter in the "Order" tab of the data filters.

• The US State tab has been added to many more order and sales based reports so filter those reports by US State.

• Turn rate calculations are now based an a 12 month turn period.  Prior to this released turn rate calculations were based on the period selected.

Dashboard

• A Today and Yesterday tab were added to the Sales at a Glance dashboard.  When selected, these filters will display the sales volume of orders or approvals depending on the date option selected aggregated by each hour of the day.

• Change some of the startup parameters for the dashboards so that they match the defaults in the data filters.

• Removed the Sales Activity Summary dashboard since it is now obsolete and unnecessary. 

New Reports

• Cancelled Items - Detail: This report is located in the Orders section.

• Cancelled Items - Summary: This report is located in the Orders section.

• Cohort Analysis - Monthly Order Counts: This report is located in the Sales -> Cohort Analysis section.

• Cohort Analysis - Monthly Unit Counts: This report is located in the Sales -> Cohort Analysis section.

• Cohort Analysis - Monthly Sales Summary: This report is located in the Sales -> Cohort Analysis section.

• Cohort Analysis - First Time Buyers: This report is located in the Sales -> Cohort Analysis section.

• Cohort Analysis - Repeat Buyers: This report is located in the Sales -> Cohort Analysis section.

• Cohort Analysis - Weekly Order Counts: This report is located in the Sales -> Cohort Analysis section.

• Cohort Analysis - Weekly Unit Counts: This report is located in the Sales -> Cohort Analysis section.

• Cohort Analysis - Weekly Sales Summary: This report is located in the Sales -> Cohort Analysis section.

• Days Since First Order: This report is located in the Customer section.

• First Time Buyers: This report is located in the Customer section.

• Hourly Sales Summary: This report is located in the Sales section.

• Inventory Value As Of: This report is located in the Inventory section.

• Inventory Received - No Invoice: This report is located in the Purchase Orders section.

• Pending SKU Sales: This report is located in the Inventory section.

• Sales Person Product Sales: This report is located in the Sales Person section.

• Transaction Log: This report is located in the Inventory section.

Report Enhancements and Fixes

Payment Transaction Listing

• Added a Payment Method tab to the data filters for this report.

Many more fixes and updates have been made to various reports reported by SEOM users.  Most of these are minor or cosmetic in nature and not significant to list individually.

With this major release, Communiqué ships with 330 standard reports, 22 reconciliation reports, and 60 data analyzers with end user capable report customizations.  Communiqué V3 now sports the MS Office 2010 look with 9 new themes added for your enjoyment.

The Data Analyzers along with user capable report customizations are the most important new features for Communiqué making this release a must have release.  This new feature adds a whole new dimension to analyzing your data and goes far beyond the capabilities of standard reports.

Many of the Data Analyzers include a drill down capability which allow you to see the details behind some of the data.  For example:  many of the inventory data analyzers provide a data page to view the SKU details, Sales Analyzer, Purchase Orders, and Suppliers info.  It's a powerful feature which allows you to look at the details behind some of the data.

The Data Analyzers stream line reporting by including so many more capabilities you can literally combine many standard reports into one.  With the ability to choose your data columns, column resizing, column moving, column filtering and sorting, column groupings, etc., you can pretty much have your data anyway you want it.  Any changes made to data analyzer or filtering of data is immediate and can be previewed or sent to a printer with the changes you made.

The Data Analyzer comes with it's own end user customizable reporting tool.  Any changes to the Data Analyzer layout and/or data is immediately available for preview or printing.  The report customizations are extensive allowing the end user to further customize the report to a near limitless degree.  Titles, footers, colors, margins, page setup and sizing, colors, styles, and many other report behaviors are available for end user customization.

The Data Analyzers open up a new realm for Communiqué.  Where Communiqué was once static with it's standard reports, it is now much more interactive with the Data Analyzers.  This release includes 2 new utilities the "Product Re-Pricer" and the "Reorder Point Calculator" which illustrates the direction Communiqué will be heading with regards to greater integration and interactivity with your data.

Webinars about V3 can be found here....

Starting with this release, we will go back to 30 to 60 day release cycle.  We will be adding many new Data Analyzers and will release them more frequently.  The changes and enhancements for V3 were numerous and extensive which required a longer release cycle and the reason why we have not had a public release since March 2012.

General Enhancements or Fixes

• Brand Reports:  This release features a new set of Brand reports which can be found in the Sales - Brands section.  Since Stone Edge does not support Brands directly, many merchants use an inventory custom text field for this purpose.  These report allow you to select the custom text you wish to use for the Brand.  These reports are very similar to the Sales -> Category reports.

• Gross Margin ROI:  The Gross Margin ROI reports are located in the Sales section.  These reports will help you with determining your inventory turn based on your maintained margin.

• Sales Tax by Order from History:  A new Sales Tax by Order report Financials -> Sales Taxes -> Sales Taxes by Order report has been added to this release.  This report is better suited for sales tax reporting since it takes into account returns in the month/period they occur as they are recorded in the History table.  Even though the Orders table revised numbers are adjusted for returns, they do not always account for those in the month/period they occur.  There will be more info concerning sales tax reporting with Communiqué in the coming months.

• Data Tabs:  Data tabs have been added to customer, inventory, and order/sales reports.  These data tabs provide a consistent set of filters for each class of reports so you can use the same filters for different reports within the class.  In past releases, we tried to include the most common filters in the report option section of the data filter; however, it was always a difficult task trying to determine the most useful filters to include in the limited space available.

• Filter Tabs:  Hundreds of filter tabs have been added to the reports in this release.  Now there are more search options available for most all of the reports, Data Analyzers, and Dashboards.  We've added the ability to search by Country, Sales Person, Ship Method, US States, etc. to most of the reports so your filtering capabilities are vastly expanded.

• Page Settings:  New page settings feature has been added to this release.  You can now view the report in continuous mode, two up, two up continuous, and single page.

New Themes and New Look

• Communiqué now sports the new Office 2010 look.

• 9 new themes have been added:

  Asphalt World

  Blue Print

    Communiqué 2012 - Default theme for V3.

    Dark Style
    Express Style

    High Contrast

    Seven Classic

    Sharp Plus

    White Print

Amazon Reconciliation (ASR)

• A new Accounting Summary report has been added.  This report will display all transaction for the selected period regardless of settlement or account.

New Reports

• Amazon Accounting Summary: This report is located in the Amazon section.

• Backorders by Ordered Item: This report is located in the Inventory -> Backorders section.

• Brand Sales by Date: This report is located in the Sales -> Brands section.

• Gross Margin ROI by Brand: This report is located in the Sales -> Gross Margin ROI section.

• Gross Margin ROI by Category: This report is located in the Sales -> Gross Margin ROI section.

• Gross Margin ROI by SKU: This report is located in the Sales -> Gross Margin ROI section.

• Gross Margin ROI by Supplier: This report is located in the Sales -> Gross Margin ROI section.

• Inventory Sold not Shipped by Customer: This report is located in the Orders section.

• Monthly Brand Sales: This report is located in the Sales -> Brands section.

• Order History Summary: This report is located in the Financials -> History section.

• Order History Summary by State: This report is located in the Financials -> History section.

• Product Sales by Customer: This report is located in the Sales -> Sales by section.

• Product Sales by Period: This report is located in the Sales -> Sales by section.

• Sales Tax by Order from History: This report is located in the Financials -> History section.

• Variance by Brand: This report is located in the Sales -> Variance Sales section.

• Weekly Brand Sales: This report is located in the Sales -> Brands section.