Transaction Date VS Business Date

The only thing I can really think of is enlisting a 3rd party service like Professional Advantage

or similar to build some analytical reporting tools. We used this when we needed a fiscal year look at sales + incorporation of store build out, etc. You would definitely have to weigh the cost of establishing a service like this vs. manually counting back as you mentioned.

The problem is that this needs to be done by the (different) closing manager every night, so involving add ons complicates the closing procedures.

Any other suggestions?

Alex, the thing with analytical reporting tools is that they are fully automated. The way they work is your db is auto imported on a nightly (or similar) basis, you build your OLAP cubes, creating a dashboard for reporting, define the reports and automate them out to specific people. In your case, the reports would be pulled from HQ's db and probably detailed sales by tender (or similar) by store emailed to x, y and z people. This would all be under the assumption that your HQ Client connections are strong. The whole thing is super slick, beautifully customized, pivot table based, extremely fluid - but really pricey.

Instead of counting receipts back, maybe you can use detailed sales by hour, memorize for your date span and memorize for easy use of multiple closers. But this would only cover sales.

It has been awhile since I have looked at any hourly sales reports on either side, but I will do that now and let you know what I find. When you say accounting needs all SO reporting - do you really mean all SO reports - or just tender, sales, and similar.

Jocelyn, thanks for the reply and explanation, I appreciate it.

We have some customized reports as well as individual memorized reports (like the combined Z reports) which in turn has been customized further. If accounting is using "just" the tender, combined Z report, sales, and hourly sales reports (for business day instead of transaction day) and use these numbers in their spreadsheets and accounting software then there will be discrepancies between these numbers and the buyers and managers numbers that they pull directly from RMS.

Ideally it would be nice to have a retail system that also has a business day settings, like most restaurant POS systems do, where you can set the time when the business day rolls over to the next. This way we would be able to tell the system to increment the business day at 4 o'clock in the morning instead of at midnight like RMS (essentially) does.

I have a similar problem with business week. We start our week on Friday not Sunday. It would be nice if this was user configured. It would make running reports so much easier. Both business day and business week should be customizable to meet our needs. Craig