Exception Reporting

Exception Reports

A report is usually about 'what is'.

A sales analysis is a 'what is' in that it provides information about products sold, customers or territories that bought or salespersons that sold.

"Exception" Report Explained

An exception (what is not) report is about products that were not sold, customers that did not buy or territories where products were not sold.

How Exception Reporting Helps Business

In times of market decline, exception reports identify products that are no longer viable. For wholesalers that offer a wide range of products, the question is: are you selling your company exclusively or are you selling product lines exclusively? If a retailer in a location has been buying only 10% of your product lines, it makes sense to look for other retailers in the same area that are interested in buying from the other 90%.

Exception reporting and an online order entry program would prevent exclusivity conflicts among retailers in a given location. Due to business dynamics, a product line is either exclusive or non-exclusive in a location at any given period. Expanding and at the same time keeping the customer base happy will need an innovative business strategy.

Steps for Creating Exception Reports

One to five GenRe files may be used to create reports.

The following steps illustrate how exception reports are created:

1. Click the [Report] button of the main menu:

2. The report manager screen is displayed. Click [Create] and check [Multiple files (exception)]:

3. Select Sample Contacts File and Sample Suburbs File.

(When using multiple files in a report, the files must be linked. A file is linked to another if it includes the record key of another file or vice versa. For example, a customer file is linked to a sales file if the customer number is part of the sales record. Among the sample files, only the contacts and suburbs are linked. For illustration purposes, they are going to be used here. We are going to have a report of suburbs where there are no contacts. The report could easily be products not sold (sales and customer files are used) or a more complex report such as products not sold by selected sales persons in a given territory (sales, salespersons and territory files are used). Refer to online help subject List Creator for details on linking files.)

Click [Continue]. The program verifies the link between the files...

4. The link is confirmed. Click [Yes]:

5. The records of the first file are retrieved. Click [Continue]:

6. The fields are displayed. Since we are interested in the suburbs, there is no need to select fields from contacts file other than its record key, Contact Number, and its label.

Then click [Continue]:

7. The suburbs file is displayed. Click [Continue]:

8. There is only one field, Suburb, which is also the record key.

Click Suburb and its label to add them to the grid.

Click the sort key column to sort the report by suburbs in ascending order.

Then click [Continue]:

9. Check [Text report] and click [Continue]:

10. The labels and fields to be printed are displayed. Click [Continue]:

(In fact, contact number and its label are not required. Because this is an exception report, there are no contacts for the suburbs to be printed.)