Configuring Tradebox for Growth.

If you are fortunate enough to experience high volumes of orders, you may wish to look at reducing the number of entries you are creating in your accounts software. The following article discusses the options you have in Tradebox.

Customer Creation

If you have configured Tradebox to create individual invoices in your accounts software, you will also have an option on how to create customers. Whichever option you choose, Tradebox will always create the individual invoice with the billing and shipping details of the buyer.

Individual Customer Records

Creating individual contact records in your accounts software can have its benefits, especially if you have repeat buyers. Tradebox can automatically create you an individual customer account in your accounts software for each unique buyer. The account reference can be based on the buyers name or the name of their business, if available. Creating individual customer contacts allows you to see a history of purchases from the buyer within the contact record.

However, high volumes of customer records can take up a lot of space in the accounts software and lead to a reduction in the software's performance. Also, if you have Tradebox configured to create individual customer records in your accounts software, the first thing it needs to check is whether the account already exists. It does this by comparing the email address in the online order to the email addresses in the customer records in the accounts software. The more contacts you have in your accounts software, the longer this check will take.

Generic Customer Records

Creating individual customer records in your accounts software is not the only option available to you. The default setting in Tradebox is to use a single generic customer in your accounts software. For example, all eBay orders would be allocated to a single customer called EBAY or all Amazon orders would be allocated to a customer account called AMAZON. As discussed, Tradebox will always create the individual invoice with the billing and shipping details of the buyer. Using this option just means that the activity of all orders from a sales channel are allocated to a single generic customer record. It also means that you can save lots of space in you accounts software AND the process will be much much faster!

More information on customer creation can be found in the following article; https://help.tradebox.co.uk/hc/en-gb/articles/360023749612-Individual-vs-Generic-Sage-Customers-in-Tradebox-One.

Invoices

The default setting for Tradebox is to create individual invoices for each unique online order. This method has many benefits, especially if you wish to automate the upload of stock levels. If Tradebox is configured to create individual stock invoices, it can also automate the reduction of stock levels in the accounts software based upon the products and quantities in the invoice it creates. This allows Tradebox to then pass the amended stock level from the accounts software back to all of the integrated sales channels. This can happen in almost real time depending upon how many channels you have integrated in Tradebox and helps reduce the risk of overselling products you don't have in stock.

However, if the creation of thousands of individual invoices is starting to impact on your accounts software, you can configure Tradebox to create batch invoices instead. This is done by creating a summary entry in Tradebox. A summary can only be created for a single channel for any given period of time. So you could create a single summary in Tradebox for all of your eBay sales for the month of January but you couldn't create a single summary for all of your eBay AND Amazon sales for the month of January. The summary for your Amazon sales would need to created separately.

Once the summary has been created, it can be posted to your accounts software as either a non-stock invoice or a stock invoice. A separate non-stock invoice will be created for each payment method within the summary to allow the invoices to be allocated to a bank in the accounts software. Each invoice contains splits base on sales type (sale and carriage) and tax codes.

Creation of a stock invoice is created along the same lines, i.e. a separate invoice for each payment method within the summary. However, the product invoice will contain an item line for each SKU with the total quantity sold and the cumulative income for that SKU. Again, splits are based on sales type (sale and carriage) and tax codes. Whilst summary product invoices may not provide real time stock control, it will provide data in your accounts for product reporting, such as product profitability.

Fees

If you are integrated with online marketplaces like eBay and Amazon, Tradebox can be configured to download the associated fees that are charged for selling on them. Individual Fees can be passed into your accounts software directly as bank payments. However, if you are looking to save space, configure Tradebox to summarise the fees and post these as batch entries.