Tip #133
Determining How Often a Customer Buys From You

Every time you enter a new order, flowerSoft displays the customer’s order history.  This tells you how many orders the customer has placed with you, the value of those orders and the average amount of each order.

While this information is very useful to you and your customers in knowing how to deal with the customer, it does not help you if for example you want to start a discount program for customer that buy from you every week or every month.

flowerSoft must know when customers place orders.  So how do you do some data mining and get that information out of flowerSoft’s vaults?

What is data mining, you ask?

Generally, data mining is the process of analyzing data and summarizing it into useful information.  This information that can be used to increase revenue, cuts costs, or both.
Technically, data mining is the process of finding correlations or patterns among dozens of fields in large databases.

OK, so how do we get this information out of flowerSoft?  Same as always, very easily as long as you know where to go to get it.

Here is how.  First follow this path: M, R, A, B and then 2

That should place you on this screen…

Select option #4 to start the process…

First flowerSoft will ask you if you want to print the existing figures, in case you just want a paper copy of what you printed to the screen.

Then flowerSoft will ask you for the date range you want to analyze.

The flowerSoft will give you the option to select all your house accounts or only one.

A new option, if you select to process all accounts, flowerSoft will ask you if you only want house accounts.

You now have the option to select all methods of payment.

or just ask for a specific one.

As always, flowerSoft gives you an opportunity to look over what you have selected.

flowerSoft now gives the option to print a detailed report or a summary report.

and also as usual, it gives you the option to print to the screen or to paper.
I always recommend printing to the screen first, in case it is not what you wanted.  Why waste the paper.

Below is how the detailed and summary reports look like…

This is the detailed report.  It shows each order included in the report.

This is the summary report.  It only show the number of orders for each week, month and year.

If you have any questions or comments, please let me know.