All of the book and non-book merchandise that you carry is stored in the Merchandise file. Each item has its own record containing the ISBN or product code, title, author, publisher, primary vendor, section code, retail price, unit cost, date last sold, date last received, sales history graph (by weeks, months and years), receipt history and much more.
Trying to work with thousands, or tens of thousands of records at a time can extremely difficult. Fortunately, The Book Wizard has excellent tools for creating smaller, more manageable groups of records. The Select tool enables you to find all the books published by Random House or all of your cookbooks, poetry books, or Core stock. The Search Editor allows you to conduct a more detailed search using an almost unlimited set of criteria. Create the search criteria by clicking on a field from the scrollable list of Available Fields, add a comparison and a value until you have defined your search. This search will find all of books published by Haper/Collins, that you have two or more copies of, that cost twenty five dollars or more. You can even create a list of all the books that sold yesterday, or last week, or last month.
The selection of books can sorted in a number of ways, to make them even more manageable. Just click on the field that you want to sort by, title, author, units on hand, date last sold, etc., and the list will be sorted in just a second or two. This list can even be sorted by multiple fields like Section and Title.
After you have selected and sorted your list of books, you can view the list in several different ways by making a choice from the Output View menu. The most useful view is the View by Performance. You enter the time frame (six weeks, nine months, two years, etc.) and the program quickly calculates how many units were sold during that time. It also displays the units on hand, date last sold, and date last received. This information is extremely valuable for determining which books are your best sellers, as well as which books have been on the shelves to long. The list can even be sorted by units sold. Most booksellers will view each section of the store by performance and then sort by performance. This allows them to quickly identify the best selling books from each section and designate them as Core Stock, books they always want in stock.
The way that you can select, sort, and view books in the Merchandise file, makes it easy to find the books that should be reordered, as you will see on the Purchase Order page.
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