FlexQuery Viewer Edition is designed purely to provide access to information either to save time or to allow the user to apply some insight to the information presented. Being able to do this can have a big effect on profitability, either by identifying situations which may cause a financial loss or by being able to devote time more efficiently to other areas. Many of the advanced features of FlexQuery Professional are not needed at this level.

Like FlexQuery professional, custom view queries are available to be run at the click of a button. However, the custom view queries available must be specifically designed in FlexQuery Professional and marked as available to the Viewer. Let’s call that a viewer query.

Since the intention is to be able to identify and run a specific viewer query quickly, the Viewer provides a number of ways to hide queries not intended for the task at hand.

One of the ways this is done is by the use of a FlexQuery button inside Retail Pro, which appears in strategic areas:

When launched, the Viewer Queries shown are only those selected to be shown in the Receipts area of Retail Pro.

Outside of Retail Pro, a shortcut can be configured to show one category only, enabling an additional FlexQuery Viewer user to launch straight into a specified set of Viewer Queries.

Once launched, Viewer provides minimal interactivity, allowing some filtering and the ability to change the date. Printing is also available.

Since nothing else can be changed, a store procedure involving the use of the data can be prepared and added to a store manual.

Let’s look at some practical scenarios of how you can use FlexQuery to help your business:

Purpose: Allow Salespersons to see how their sales totals compare.

This Viewer Query summarizes sales and also ranks them with the best salesperson on top. The addition of the vendor name filter allows one vendor to be selected. Only those who have sold any product from the filtered vendor(s) are shown. The totals are automatically re-ranked.

Designed for a competitive sales environment within a store, or where the store pays a commission.

Purpose: Allows a store manager to proactively manage stock discrepancies.

Using this viewer query, a store manager can identify items where the stock control has broken down. Identifying these items quickly frees up Head Office time tracking down what went wrong and, more importantly, ensures that stock figures being used for other reporting are as accurate as possible. Since inventory valuation is in fact reduced by these items, a balance sheet falsely shows lower inventory value until this is corrected.

Purpose: Fill gaps in the shop floor display to ensure store always looks fully stocked

This Viewer Query assists with maintaining shop appearance.

Purpose: Monitor discounts manually applied by staff members

It is important for a manager to be aware of all manual discounting so as to ensure that items are not sold below cost and to ensure the discount is legitimate and appropriate. Discounts are often profit killers and the level of acceptable discounting for a particular company will vary. What will not vary is that any discount will impact on profitability. This Viewer Query allows a store manager to be tasked with controlling discounts to a level acceptable to a company. Clawing back any excessive discounts will improve profitability in the future.

If your GP is 25% and you’ve just given a customer a 10% discount, you would need to sell 67% more items to compensate for the margin you’ve just given away.

FlexQuery includes Customer Relationship Management (CRM)-based queries. This allows highly detailed analysis of your customer data collected by Retail Pro, and ultimately can export a file for use with email merge applications or for sending to a third party bulk email specialist.

The CRM category includes the following source queries:

Since there are a variety of ways companies use to encourage customers to spend more, how you would utilize FlexQuery will vary. However, the basic principles apply and here we will walk through one example.

CASE 1: Finding the top twenty customers by spend

Query: Customer Invoices

Description of Query: Shows every invoice for customers during the date range specified (eg Last Month)

How to:

1)      Select the query ‘Customer Invoices’ (see above) and set a date range.

2)      Click the dropdown arrow on the ‘View’ Button and select ‘View as Pivot’

This will immediately launch a pivot table.

3)      If you don’t have a predefined ‘Top Twenty Layout’, set up the pivot like this:

4)      Tick ‘Show Options’ and ensure that the pivot is fully expanded and that the expand buttons are hidden. The screen should look like this:

5)      Now we need to sort the customer totals. Tick ‘Show Sorting’ and configure as below:

Sally Smith is our top customer.

6)      Tick ‘Show Details’. The screen changes to:

7)      Now we can export. Select the appropriate export type from the Export button drop-down:

The usual export type is Excel. From there, if your bulk emailer requires CSV, you can load the file and Save As CSV.

HINT: If you export a pivot without selecting ‘Show Details’, the Excel spreadsheet will be a copy of the pivot itself. Email Merge requires every cell in every row of the exported file to contain data.

The procedure could be assisted by adding the ‘Allow Email’ field to the pivot’s filter area. This would ensure you can easily filter out those who specifically have not approved being on your email list.

You can then change the filtering by clicking on the down arrow of the ‘Allow Email’ field.

HINT: Remember to save any changes to the layout.

HINT: Click the ‘Add to My FlexQuery’ button to ensure your entire Custom View is saved ready for future use. The Custom View screen which appears looks like this:

If you have already predefined a filter for the source query, you can select it from the Filter selector to always apply it to the view.

Much more detailed analysis of items bought by customers (as shown in the Customer Invoices with Item Detail source query) is available. Using this you can identify customers in a number of different ways, including (but not limited to):

• All customers who bought a specific product
• All customers who bought more than $500 of product from one vendor
• All customers who bought more than $500 of product from one department and one vendor
• All customers who returned items
• All customers who bought more than X quantity
• All customers who had more than X discount applied to their purchase
• Comparison of sales volume for customers by store
• Summary of purchases over time (eg each quarter or month)

This allows you to get creative with your customer promotions. If you offer to include a customer in a draw for a weekend getaway if they buy a certain product, FlexQuery can extract the information for you. If you want to email a customer if they buy a certain product, you can get the email addresses extracted. If you offer customer discounts, you can monitor your margins to ensure your profitability is not adversely affected.

And, since Retail Pro’s PoS flags are included, you can use these for analysing how effective an email campaign is.