Account&See Invoicing and Accounting

Pro Forma and Mailing Label Searches

In addition to the accounting facilities of the software, Account&See offers you the tools to run your business more efficiently and, hopefully, more profitably. For instance, for the purpose of contacting your customers or clients, we offer mailing labels and a mailshot module that allows you to send any type of letter via print or e-Mail.

There are a number of ways to select the customers to be included in any mailing - you can select all clients, clients in a specific Prefix Group, an individual customer, selected customers, or for really targetted mailings, this 'Pro Forma Search' facility. Account&See allows you to perform extensive searches for the purpose of selling more products to your existing customers. For instance, if you sell washing machines, you can select all customers who have bought a washing machine between 10 and 14 months ago to offer them an extended warranty. However, to save on your marketing, production and postal costs you can refine this search even further by selecting all customers who have bought a washing machine within the last 10 and 14 months but exclude all those customers who have already purchased an extended warranty. Another use of this search could be to improve customer satisfaction and, therefore, loyalty - for example, you could set up a search that would locate all the customers for whom you had built a conservatory, made a piece of furniture, developed a website etc. between 6 and 8 week's previously just to give them a courtesy call to check everything is okay.

These searches may seem complicated but are, in fact, really simple to create, and can prove an extremely powerful, useful and effective tool to either sell more goods, or to keep an eye on your customers - easily spotting any of those that may have drifted along to another supplier. For instance you could see a list of all customers who had bought something from you between 3 and 15 months previous, but have not purchased anything from you in the previous 3 months. As you can save these searches and, using the 'Dates are relative' check box, you could instantly repeat this process every month and from the results returned perhaps send them a new brochure, or simply give them a quick telephone call to check everything is okay.



In the above example, we have selected to find all customers who have purchased a 21" Samron TFT Monitor, but have not purchased any maintenance - the box on the right of the screen displays a list of matching customers - in this case just JC Photographic.


Creating your own searches

To begin with, in the top box 'Search Project Title' enter a short description of the search - this will be shown in the Search drop down boxes of the Mailshot and Mailing Labels.
The Second box - Find Customers In - allows you, if you use Group Prefixes, to narrow the customers to one of your group prefix codes (i.e. only select from your Mail Order / Shop / Internet customers).
The next box down is one of two product selection windows. There is no need to use both product selection windows - for instance, if you wanted to send a mailing to everybody who purchased a previous version of your software - because you had a new release available, simply locate the code for your software product and save the search - you can then mail, e-mail or print labels for all of these clients. However, to explain the usefulness of being able to select two products - perhaps you released your new software product a month ago and had already mailshotted your existing customers. You could now send a follow up letter to all those customers who had not upgraded, by selecting the new software's product code in the bottom box and clicking on the 'Only the Top Product' option - this would then provide you with a list of only those customers who had bought your previous software version - and not the new version. This not only saves costs if you are posting brochures, reduces your customers' annoyance of receiving unwanted mailings or e-Mails - but also allows you to offer an incentive - perhaps a temporarily lower price - that would cause annoyance to those customers who had already paid a higher price.

The optional date fields allow you to refine the search results returned based on the date of the sales and the 'Dates are relative' checkbox allows the dates used (if any) to be automatically updated the next time the search is run. For instance, if you select a date range of 6 months ago until the present date and check the 'dates are relative' option - if you run the search again in 3 months time, the to and from dates will be automatically updated and 3 months added to the dates.
  • Either Product - In the above example any customer who bought either the MAINTENANCE or SAMTFT17 product would be selected. A customer would have had to have purchased one, or both of these products to be included in the results returned.
  • Both Products - In the above example only customers who had bought both the MAINTENANCE and SAMTFT17 product would be selected. If a customer had only bought one of these products, they would be excluded from the search.
  • Only one of these Products - In the above example only customers who had bought one of the products would be included in the returned values. If a customer had ordered both products they would not be included in the search results.
  • Only the top Product - works in a similar fashion to the previous example, but returns only those customers who bought SAMTFT17 and not MAINTENANCE
  • Only the bottom Product - would return only those customers who had bought MAINTENANCE but not SAMTFT17
  • Neither Product - locates only customers who had bought neither the Maintenance nor the Monitor.

Underneath the 'customers found' section on the right hand side, there is a button 'Use Simple Selection' that opens a new window where you can manually select the customers you wish to select - please note, however, that selections made this way are only used for the duration of the session - once you have printed your labels or mailshot letters, their 'selected' status is lost.
Below this button, a drop down menu allows you to edit any previously saved Customer Search Projects.