Best way to track sales?

I'm interested in how other sellers track their sales. I've so far been hand-entering sales into an Excel sheet and including item, price, buyer and location. This has been invaluable to me so far as I can see how much is sold from each location, how much of each item has been sold, a breakdown of income by product type, how many repeat customers I have, and so on. (Learning basic use of pivot tables is very useful here)

The problem is now business is taking off, and manually entering sales will soon be too much work. How do other people track sales, or do most people just not bother?

A few tricks I've come up with:

If you sell an item by setting the box to sellable, add a little location tag onto the item name like [VX]. Then when I see [VX] in the sales record I know what item was bought, and that it was bought from my Vixens store.

If you code a multi item vendor have it rename itself to the selected product with a location tag; eg "Vendor: Particle Eyes [DH]" in the transaction records tells me I sold Particle Eyes from the Darkest Hour vendor.

If you post something in the scripting forums, I'm sure that someone will be able to knock something together for you. A simple script could send you an email upon each sale with the info you need, you would still need to gather that information from the emails though. For more automation, you could have a datatbase, and a script to send the info to that database. It just depends how in-depth you want to get with it really.

I've been thinking about semi-automating it for some time but haven't found the time. Here was my initial idea:

When you log into your Account section on the website, you will see the Transactions option. You can download those transactions to your hard drive as an xls file.

Within excel, you can write a VBA script to open that download file (secondlife-transactions.xls), bring the contents into a master spreadsheet, and then update your range names covering the master list so you can auto-update the array(s) your reports point to. If you tag your sales with a consistent suffix (i.e. if the last 4 characters always show the store name, like your (VX) for Vixens example), then you can easily parse out the store information into another column using VBA or the RIGHT function [=RIGHT(B4, 4)]. At this point you have columns for date, product name, store, customer and price, so you can do your lookups or reports (sumproduct arrays would be handy here, or even just a pivot table) fairly easily.

If you're a database person, I suppose you'd just load it into Access and do your reporting out of Access, but I'm not a database person lol. (if you've got a hammer, everything looks like a nail, right?)

what I don't know how to do is automate the step of grabbing the transactions download from the Second Life website.

With wget and shell scripts. Because I'm a UNIX person!

*heads of to try and hack the KDC vendor into doing sales notificatiosn the way she wants*

I just download the excell files.
And parse them with a php script, which puts everything in a db.
haven't made anything fancy to look at the data, i just use phpmyadmin and sql statments to look things up when needed.

Once a month I put the transactions into a spreadsheet which is a bit of a pain and I'd like to automate that. But also my vendors email me my sales and I run an applescript that converts the emails to a text file that pastes into Excel and that way I can see not only what is selling but where it's selling.

I download the Excel transaction sheets from the LL website here about every two weeks. Then I compile them into a running monthly sheet, and edit that into something useful.

My texture sales are all through 1-prim scripted vendors that report exactly who bought what texture set. So those are easy. Those also e-mail me when each sale is made, and handle splitting profits with my partner at TRU.

The things I sell through SL Boutique are easy to tell from the others in the Excel report, and show me who made a purchase and for how much money. But to determine what item was sold, I also have to check my transaction log on SL Boutique.

My clothing and general sales store sites use a simple 3-prim, low-lag vending system with minimal capabilities. I name each vendor for the category of items sold and for the location, such as "Fashion Vendor - The Forest", "T-Shirts - Furnation". That shows up on the excel sheets, and shows me who bought an item, in what category, and for what price. But it doesn't tell me which specific item sold. I sell too many different items to do a "single prim per item" vending method. I couldn't afford the prim count at my rented sales spaces.

My work as a Builder and sim architect shows on the Excel sheet as 'gifts' or sales, depending on if it is a lump-sum payment for completing a construction phase, or the final transfer of a property and the items on it. This mostly requires manual updating to figure out what was what.

In my spreadsheet, I add columns so I can track expenses and profits related to each business. For example space rental goes against individual sites.

Some expenses can't track to individual sites, such as the upload fees for texture creations, so I have a couple of columns for a 'general overhead' category, for profits and expenses that don't fit elsewhere.

I also track in-world personal expenses and income not related to store sales (stipends, money from people joining groups, etc.), land purchase and rental fees, and transfers to other Avatar accounts and to the real world (cashing out Lindens), so I can see where my profits are going.

I'm considering a networked vending system, to make it easier to update each site, and so I have the option of doing profit sharing with a store owner, rather than renting space from them. But because of the wide variety of business ventures that I do, no one system can track all my business accounting.

Fate Gardens used vendors that emailed receipts on every sale but they caused quite a bit of server lag. Eventually I just scripted the trees in such a way that the demos themselves became the product. So now I check sales daily USING THE WEBSITE account transactions so that refunds for purchases of duplicate copyable items can be processed right away.

There is no list of Fate Gardens customers or individual sales over the last years and decades. I'm too much of a hobbyist to keep those kinds of records.

I use a popular network vendor system and the email logs it sends out are great for this.

I also recently added some popular non-networked vendor system stuff as I wanted the great Gift Card system they use, and again it can send out emails. (Although I had to ask the creator to add the mail option to the GC system - thanks again!)

either way, I have a perl script that eats the mails and stuffs the data into mysql, where I run some reports, and have an excel sheet linked to it by odbc that breaks down everything by item and by store location so I can track which ones aren't making their rent (only one so far *grin*)



*edited to stop it reading like an advert*