The reports section provides a nice method of ascertaining which products are viewed the most often, which products are the most popular by sales, and which customers are the biggest spenders—certainly all useful information for the conscientious business owner. Obviously this information can be of vital importance while determining how to order new stock or working out which demographics are the biggest spenders in your store—possibly for creating targeted promotions and so on.

Actually viewing the reports is basic stuff so we need not cover it in too much depth here, other than to say that the information provided here is only a fraction of the information that is actually saved by your system and, of course, the layout of the data doesn’t come with colorful graphs and so on. If you are looking to capture more or different types of info, as well as have access to different methods of presenting the data, then the community contributions are the way to go. In fact, in Chapter 7 we will look at how to generate custom reports for low stock levels. You might find that you need a variety of different reports, so going over this example will set you up to add whatever reports you like in future.