Customer Summary Report

[Robert L Brush III]

The "Customer Summary Report" is a customer profit report, it can help
with job analysis by comparing the income and expenses for a specific
customer.  Under the options for the report a tab labeled "Expense
Accounts" will allow the selection of one or many expense accounts.
Likewise the tab for "Income Accounts" will allow the selection of one
or more income accounts.  The tab for "Display" will allow sorting by
name, profit percentage, or amount of profit.  The "No Customer" is a
warning that the report may be inaccurate, as the results are not all
properly labeled.

Possible use scenarios:

Tracking retail sales from different cities:
Income:Princeton Showroom Sales
Income:Beckley Showroom Sales
Expense:Princeton COGS
Expense:Beckley COGS

Tracking rental properties:
Income:Downtown
Income:Northwestern
Income:Park Ave
Expense:Downtown
Expense:Northwestern
Expense:Park Ave

Tracking types of business:
Income:Labor
Income:Materials
Expense:Labor
Expense:Cost of Goods Sold

Tracking commission sales:
Income:Robert Sales
Income:Micah Sales
Expense:Robert COGS
Expense:Micah COGS

So to get the most out of the report use the Income & Expense tabs to
hone down the information displayed on the report.  By default it
includes all income and expense accounts, GnuCash can't really predict
the names and classification of income and expense accounts.  To be
useful out of the box, any thing that happened income or expense wise
shows up as "No Customer": Rent, Paychecks, Utilities, Bank Charges..
everything.  Luckily it is easy to remove this information, if it is
distracting.  It can also shed a light on how much information is being
ignored, if the settings are overly selective the report might look
good, but only be showing 10% of the picture.

Why does the information look out of place by default:

All invoices have an "Owner" in GnuCash speak, so any invoices made will
show a customer and make it to the report.  When creating a "Bill" the
"Default Chargeback Customer" is blank, and often gets underused.  To
use the profit report this needs to be utilized, this is the tag that
decides which line to attach the expense.  Without a customer the bill
will belong to "No Customer", when entering income in a random register
instead of creating an invoice, it  will also  belong to "No Customer",
but that doesn't happen very often.

Inventory based businesses won't benefit as much because of the nature
of the report.  Currently there isn't a way to avoid this.  Creating
invoices for items out of inventory usually shows as 100% profit, hardly
reality.  The best way to handle this is to use a different income
account and exclude it from the report, if that won't over-complicate
the entry of invoices.  Once you get on a good start the invoice line
item auto-fill will help remember the accounts for inventory items.

Good luck!



On Sun, 2013-06-16 at 10:38 -0700, Robert Smits wrote:
> When I do a Customer Summary Report (Reports, Business, Customer Summary) in 
> my GnuCash 2.4.11 running on OpenSuse 12.3 I get a report with the following 
> appearance:
> 
> Customer		Profit			Markup	Sales			Expense
> VA7XXX		CAD 7.00		100%	CAD 7.00		CAD 0.00
> VE7XXX		CAD 130.00	100%	CAD 130.00	CAD 0.00
> VE7XXX		CAD 130.00	100%	CAD 130.00	CAD 0.00
> No Customer	-CAD 5,741.73	-442%	CAD 1,299.91	CAD 7,041.64
> Total			-CAD 5,474.73	-349%	CAD 1,566.91	CAD 7,041.64
> 
> As it happens, I have just started using Customers and Invoices, so there are 
> only three in the system. Where is the other information coming from? The 
> part starting with No Customer, I mean. And how do I get it to stop reporting 
> it?
>