Do You Have Control Of Your Data?
After having been involved in doing computer software support for almost 30 years, I have found that there are a number of things that have been recurring issues that are entirely end-user generated. These often overlooked issues primarily involve improper software set-up and usage.
Often, these issues create even bigger issues for the business for such things as financial liability (Additional Taxes, Fines, and Penalties, etc.), and cost issues (over/understated inventory quantities and costs, etc). Some examples of this are:
Item Set-up
- Incorrectly entered Item costs.
- Missing item information that causes item based Sales Taxes to not calculate correctly,
- or not to calculate at all.
- Item Descriptive information not completely or consistently formatted.
- Categories, Sub-Categories, and Profile code fields not being properly assigned
I ran into a recent issue with a customer who had added a large number of items with improperly configured tax set-up. This means that when the items were sold, taxes were not calculated correctly, resulting in monthly sales taxes reports being inaccurate. This situation was not corrected for well over a year. This resulted in tax payments being made that were insufficient..
This same customer also had issue with Item Categories and Sub-Categories with not being assigned properly. This meant that when running Sales history report by item Category, the reports displayed incomplete and inaccurate information.
Customer Set-up
- Customers assigned the wrong category
- Improperly formatted customer addresses and email addresses.
Another recent customer issue involved sales reports by Customer Category that were inaccurate, resulting in poor reporting. Also, large numbers of email addresses were being bounced because the email addresses were entered incorrectly, or were incomplete. Catalog mailings that were returned because the street addresses were wrong. – This is primarily a training issue.
If you are having any issues that are similar to the above, please call the CCS Retail Systems Support Department in order to schedule a review of your system and training needs.
– John