• You could use it to see what is happening at each of your locations in real time. Sample Daily Sales Report
• You could use it to follow the sales process from start to the final delivery of the product.
• You could use it to design and automate commission plans to meet specific goals.
• You could incentiivize your salespeople with on-line commission reports. Sample Commission Report
• You could use it to produce competitive listings by location and salespeople. Sample Ranking Report
• You could use it to review sales by gross margin to determine who is selling well and who needs help.Sample GM Report

• Tracking the delivery time on each sale is a big tool for managing customer satisfaction.
• Automating commissions and making them available on-line reduces or eliminates the wasted phone calls on payday.
• Improving gross margins can only happen if you know which salespeople are making the low margin deals.
• Software that is customized for a particular business produce screens that are vastly simplified which greatly reduces training time.
• Salespeople productivity can be improved by providing lists of customers for followup in slack times.
• Management productivity is also improved by providing real time information that can be sorted and filtered to determine where their attention should be focused.

At one time I provided a client with a daily sales summary report. Each of his locations would fax a form they had prepared by hand to my CPA firm and we would summarize the sales for the previous day, month-to-date, and year-to-date. The client needed this information as fast as possible in order to adjust advertising programs and to be able to react to stores that were having problems. Waiting for the financials next month was simply not an option. The rub was that it was very costly to produce this daily sales report because of the problem with faxes, people in the stores not knowing how to fill out the forms, etc.

Automating the sales order system using the Cloud approach eliminated the fax machine and all of the related problems of "did you send it" and "I can't read this number" calls. Since sales were entered as they were produced, managers did not have to wait for a daily report due in at 11:00 each morning. The error rate went down because the people most familiar with the sale were doing the actual database entry. The amount of timely information zoomed since the managers could not only see the total sales, but drill down to individual sales and their gross margins. While there was a cost for the initial software, the Client recovered that cost in about 4 months through improved efficiency in their sales process.

Since every business derives it's value from how it uniquely deals with it's customers, the only way to approach sales order software is by customizing it to fit how you want to do business. This makes a blanket quote for sales order software impracticable, but I can give you several options to consider:
• Flat fee quote based upon what it is you want. This is my preferred approach and typically the fee is between $5,000 and $10,000.
• Hourly rates, if you prefer.
• Rental rates that can be as low as $250/month.