This chapter is all about creating reports to make managing sales orders easier. Rather than focusing on how much we sold or how much we made, we're going to focus on the managing of orders for fulfilment, shipment, and any other operating process required or utilized as part of your Sales Order Processing (SOP) operating procedures.

In the previous chapter, we spent time reviewing both posted and unposted transactions. We looked at sales by item class, salesperson, state, and even a custom category field. As important as monitoring sales is, equally important to a successful distribution company is managing the steps of the sales… the life cycle, if you will. How does it get from a quote to an invoice, are all the steps being followed, are the steps occurring in a timely fashion, and will the customer be satisfied with the speed at which these steps are occurring? Hopefully, these BI tools will help you...