Reporting

A revenue figure on its own says little. Only beside last year, beside the budget and beside an explanation does it become a statement. That is exactly how this module is built.

The data basis is invoice line items, one row per item, with customer, ISBN, title, quantity, price, discount, sales channel, sales rep and commission. They come from invoiced documents in Orders & invoices or by import from a legacy system, where a file is chosen, the mapping profile set and the result checked before it is confirmed. Nothing can be created by hand in the list itself: it serves only to inspect this data basis, not to enter it. Where a link is shaky, the link status says so; from every line item there is a jump back to the order.

The dashboard analyzes this data from five directions: overall, customers, products, countries and sales channels. You choose the tenant and the year; the module adds the previous year by itself. Every table puts the current value beside the previous year's value month by month, in the overall tab beside the budget as well, with the variance in euros and in percent. Within the products it goes on by product group, order type, edition type and segment; the titles for them come from title data, the customers from the CRM.

The countries tab can do more than a table, namely a world map shaded by revenue. You choose the metric, the country dimension (country of invoice or country of delivery), whether the figures are shown absolutely or as a change against the previous year, and how the classes are formed, as quantiles, natural breaks, linear or logarithmic, for instance. Along with that come views for the world, Europe, the DACH region, the Americas and Asia-Pacific, a display as areas or as circles, and a switch to the table at any time. Four key figures stand above it: total revenue with a year-on-year comparison, the number of countries with revenue, the strongest country and the share of foreign sales.

You maintain the budget in the module itself, per year, per dimension, month by month, with an annual total. It is therefore not a year-end exercise in a spreadsheet but runs along in the planned/actual comparison. And where a month is out of line, the comment hangs directly on the row. It is written, changed and deleted where the variance shows up, instead of in an e-mail alongside.

For line items with a service period there is accrual allocation, first as a preview for a period, then as a run. An annual subscription does not land in the invoice month as a whole but is spread over the months in which it is delivered. Reading is open to anyone who is signed in and has a tenant; only administration may write budgets and delete invoices.