You can enhance many of the features in Microsoft Dynamics Retail Management System (RMS) by organizing your store into departments and categories. Using the natural divisions in your inventory - such as groups of related stock, or the physical areas in your store - you can streamline ordering and physical inventory counting, identify sales trends and create more detailed reports, and make ringing up items faster and easier. You can also use departments and categories when performing batch operations, such as updating price or cost information, printing labels, moving stock in and out of offline inventory, or performing SQL operations on the store database.
Give some thought to the inventory groupings that would benefit you most. For example, as the owner of a sporting goods store, you could group your inventory into departments by sport (Football, Golf, Hunting), by venue (Indoor, Outdoor), by type of inventory (Shoes, Equipment, Clothing), or by customer (Men, Women, Kids). And each department could contain categories for the groups of items included within the department, such as Uniforms or Fishing Poles.
Our series of articles on inventory management will tell you more about how departments and categories can increase the efficiency of many of your retail operations.
Departments and categories are just one of the ways you can create detailed, specialized reports about the activity in your store. With a few simple changes to the reports that are built into Microsoft Dynamics RMS, you can:
View information for a specific time period, such as a year-to-date Detailed Sales Report, or a list of customers who visited the store within the last month.
Create a Price List for a specific department, category, or supplier, and then sort by price or bin location.
For more information about customizing the reports in Microsoft Dynamics RMS, refer to Store Operations Online Help.
