The business insights explorer is often an underused feature on every copy of Sage 100. This dynamic tool is designed to help you unlock the data in your ERP system and learn more about your business. The tool can be found in two ways. First, under each module there’s an explore menu which will list all the views that are applicable to that particular module. Also, there’s a business insights module that you’ll find a list of all the views that are available throughout the entire system.
To understand a little bit more about the business insights explorer, let’s go into the customer view that is found underneath “AR” and get a better understanding of how the system works. On the left-hand side you will see a navigation pane. Across the middle is the data view where we are going to do most of our work. Below is the preview window that we will talk more about in just a few minutes.
When the view first opens, it provides us a list of every customer available within the ABC company. In this case there are seventeen customer records. The window is showing us total “open AR” plus the “current balance”, and “aging buckets” for each customer. This recreates an AR agent report at a summary level. We can add totals with a few clicks of a button for each one of the buckets that give us an idea of an outstanding balance on all our open AR. You can see that some companies don’t owe you anything, but also who has the highest balance.
If you want to understand a little bit more about a certain balance, then go to the navigation pane and click on “Open Invoices” under the “Preview” section. By doing so, the preview window in the lower portion of the screen will give you a list of all the open invoices that add up to make that balance. If you want to know more about an individual invoice, you can double click on the customer record to get a list of individual invoices that make up that balance. By doing this you can look below at the actual customer or the invoice payment history on each one of those invoices and see the history.
Once you hit “back” you will return to the customer screen. You can also select a customer and select “Customer Contacts” on the navigation pane to work on collecting the invoice. You can also look at open orders, open RMAs, customer memos, and customer payments without going to a particular screen. If you want to modify information about a customer, go to the “Task” section of the navigation pane and click on “Customer Maintenance” to have the system take you directly into the customer maintenance window so you can maintain this customer all while not leaving the explorer view in the back.
In addition to maintaining the customer, you can enter an invoice, process a cash receipt, process the sales order in RMA, and whatever you need to process. I hope this has helped you gain a better understanding of some of the power found in the Business Inside Explorer. In future tips, let’s explore how to expand the use of this tool by filtering the results, customizing the columns of the data grids, working with charts, adding subtotals, and launching additional views.
