Managing your sales

Does anyone use any kind of program to manage sales? I only use some excel spreadsheets to control the amounts, and put some coments about the date and who purchase, and on a side column a list of best seller items...

What do you use on your shops?

No all I do is download transaction history, usually daily

I use HippoVend, so some of that is done for me. And it exports to CSV.

what sales?

do not get enough sales to worry about managing them

lucky if I manage to get sales, let alone manage sales

I use also Excel to manage my sales. A spread sheet with sales per shops location and another to count the items sold and determine the best vendors. I do that daily and everyweek datas are recorded on a Excel chart to have a complete overview.

All I use is the downloaded Transaction History & an Excel spreadsheet.

I probably go a bit further than most. I download the Transaction history weekly in Excel format. Then, I have my vendors sending per-transaction delivery data to an email account. I have a program I wrote which converts this email data into Excel format, and I then paste both sets of data into an Excel template I wrote, which reconciles sales versus deliveries. Helps me identify missed deliveries, and fradulent transactions (potentially, none so far ). It also gives me good stats on sales by location, Avatar, and Item. But mostly, it's all custom software.

I actually have a plan to use the transaction history with MS Access to create reports. I have an error in one of my tables, though, that needs sorting out.

I use stuff I added to my vendor system, any good vendor system should provide at the very least the ability to IM on sale, which you can have e-mailed to you, though of course with high volume that becomes unwieldy and e-mails will be lost.

I use a free program from Dynacom. It is called Dynacom Accounting Startup. It can be found at http://www.dynacom.com/

It is a very useful program. I track all sales transactions, customer info, sales trends, advertising costs, property costs, etc. All this for a pet supplies shop

The biggest part of the program is that it is fully customizable. And I mean FULLY! Well worth a look if you are really serious about your business but do not want the typical costs of a small business product.

As a comparison, I tried the free version of Quickbooks, also called Startup and found that it had several errors everytime at loadup, even after several clean installs. Also, it did not have anywhere near the level of customizing. Then I also tried Microsoft's free accounting package, but that will not run unless you have MS Office installed so that is fairly limiting for those of us that are budget minded.

I also just download my transaction history to excel and do pivot tables to find out how many of what im selling. Helps me decide what to keep, what to get rid of and what to make more of. I also can see who is buying alot etc without endless scrolling while on the SL web page.

This thread is giving me a decided business management inferiority complex. Myself...I, erm, look at my Lindens when I log on. If there are bunches, I withdraw them. I look at the transaction log and the HippoVend reports. If there are no sales somewhere, I stop renting there. If there are gobs of sales somewhere, I say "yippee!"

"Math class is tough!"
-Teen Talk Barbie

LOL...its a bit diff for me...I have one huge store with hundreds of items. I use no vendors. So i have to rely on the individual item transactions to determine what has been purchased. The location is not a concern to me, tho it was when i had 10 stores. So i have less on the front end doing the compiling and data analysis i do myself on the back end.

You and me both. I download my transactions into Excel every couple of weeks, and that's it. I'm only interested in the monthly totals.