Video tutorials

Look beyond sales revenue to understand the profitability behind your results. See how to add profit and margin alongside sales so you can compare revenue and profitability in the same analysis. You can identify periods where margin is falling, move into customer-level detail, and sort the results to find the accounts contributing most to the change. From there, drill into the underlying transactions to identify low-margin or unprofitable sales and review the discounts or individual transactions behind them.

Find cross-sell opportunities by looking for gaps in what customers are buying. See how Workspaces can identify customers purchasing from one product category but not another and return a list of accounts that may have an opportunity. You can then explore the same pattern across your wider customer base and filter the data to focus on specific category combinations. This gives you a repeatable way to find accounts where related products or categories are missing from the current sales mix.

Spot customers showing signs of decline before the problem becomes more significant. See how Workspaces can use conversational AI to identify customers with falling sales or margin and surface observations that can help sales reps decide where to focus their attention. You can then examine performance across consecutive periods to find customers whose sales have been declining over several months. The resulting analysis can be saved and revisited as new data arrives, helping you keep track of changing customer behavior over time.

Ask questions about your data in plain language and get answers directly in Workspaces. See how conversational AI can return a chart or grid, highlight relevant figures, and provide observations that help explain the result. You can continue the analysis by asking follow-up questions or opening the result for a closer look. When you have what you need, you can save it as a favorite, add it to a dashboard, or export it to share with your team.

Use dashboards and detailed analysis to see how sales reps are performing against budget or quota. Start with a high-level view of performance, then filter the dashboard for an individual rep and change the reporting period to compare sales with budget year to date. From there, you can investigate where performance is falling behind and save, share, or add the results to a dashboard. This makes it easier to spot issues early and focus attention on the reps who may need support.

Identify dead stock and slow-moving inventory before it ties up more cash and warehouse space. See how to combine sales and stock information in the same analysis, then filter for products with no sales activity but stock still on hand. You can sort the results to find your biggest inventory concerns and save the analysis as a favorite, add it to a dashboard, or create an alert. You'll also see how to build custom inventory calculations using sales and stock measures, then compare results across different reporting periods. This gives you a clearer picture of stock movement and helps you make informed purchasing and inventory decisions.

Prepare for supplier negotiations with a clear picture of purchasing activity, costs, and supplier performance. See how a supplier analysis dashboard brings together information such as purchasing costs, quantities, open purchase orders, average order values, and potential price changes. You can filter the dashboard for a particular supplier or product category to review the figures that matter to your discussion. From there, move into detailed analysis to investigate purchasing cost variances, compare trends over time, and drill down to individual purchase order transactions. This gives you the evidence to understand spending patterns, question price changes, and approach supplier conversations with data to support your decisions.

Keep track of on-time, in-full (OTIF) delivery performance so you can identify service issues before they affect customer relationships. See how to bring OTIF measures into your analysis and review performance trends across a rolling twelve-month period. You can investigate months where delivery performance falls, switch to customer-level analysis, and use filters to identify the lowest-performing customers. From there, explore product categories, individual products, and suppliers to understand what's contributing to missed delivery targets. This helps you identify recurring problems, focus on the areas that need attention, and take action to improve delivery reliability.

Get to the bottom of inventory discrepancies instead of repeatedly writing off unexplained variances. See how to use stock snapshots and historical inventory data to investigate changes over a rolling twelve-month period. By switching between data streams, variance analysis, and product dimensions, you can identify where the largest differences occur and drill into the underlying detail. Depending on the data available, you can investigate discrepancies by product, warehouse location, bin, or user. This helps you uncover patterns behind stock variances, understand potential causes of shrinkage, and address recurring inventory issues before they continue costing your business money.

Bring sales, purchasing, and stock information together to get a clearer view of your inventory position. See how to add measures such as sales quantity and stock on hand, then use those values to create calculations directly in the grid. You’ll also see how to build measures such as weeks of cover and stock turnover, and adapt the calculations for different reporting periods. Because the results use the data already in your analysis, they update as new ERP data becomes available.

Get ready for reviews without spending hours chasing numbers, waiting on reports, or piecing information together. See how a dashboard brings KPIs from across the business into one place, including sales to budget, profitability, customer credits, quote conversion, rep performance, inventory, and finance. You’ll also see how to focus the entire dashboard on a region, add filters such as product class, and drill into the data behind a result when something needs more attention. This gives you a faster way to answer your own questions and walk into a meeting with the detail already at hand.

Trace a change in margin from the overall trend down to the customers and transactions behind it. Start by comparing margin percentage across rolling 12-month periods, then narrow the analysis to the months where performance has declined. From there, see how to identify customers contributing to the negative variance and move into transaction-level detail. You can bring in additional information such as salespeople, products, and product classes to keep investigating the cause, helping you answer questions about a margin anomaly without waiting for a separate report.

See receivables across the wider business and quickly narrow in on the areas that need attention. Start with an aging view that brings outstanding amounts from across entities, branches, product lines, and customers into one analysis. You’ll see how to switch the view to compare trading entities, focus on a specific aging bucket, and then move down to the customers contributing to that balance. By filtering for overdue amounts, you can identify accounts receivable risk earlier and understand where it sits before it reaches your financial reporting.

Look beyond revenue to understand which customers, sales reps, products, or locations are actually contributing the most value. See how to add profit and margin percentage alongside sales, identify changes in margin over time, and break the results down by sales rep. You can compare high-revenue performers with those delivering stronger margins, then focus on a particular rep and continue drilling into product categories and individual products. This helps reveal where strong sales are also profitable, and where apparently good performance may be hiding weaker margins.

Investigate outstanding receivables without relying on another team to find the detail for you. See how to switch to an aging view, identify customers with the highest outstanding balances, and move from summary figures into the transactions behind them. You can then focus on a specific customer and review outstanding invoices alongside information such as credit limits, payments, and original invoice amounts. This gives you the context you need to understand what is contributing to the balance and follow it through to the underlying detail.

Learn how to monitor important results with alerts. You'll set the metric and red, yellow, and green thresholds, choose when you're notified, and set up email delivery. You'll also test an alert before creating it, subscribe to shared alerts, and restore deleted alerts within 45 days.

Learn how to see the individual records behind your results, such as invoices. You'll compare Transaction view and Transaction mode, choose transaction and dimension properties as columns, nest by invoice number, search, filter, and add calculations to dig deeper.

Learn how to take data out of the grid and use it elsewhere. You'll copy selected cells into Excel or Google Sheets, or export a wider set as CSV or XLSX. XLSX exports keep conditional formatting and nested rows, so your view carries across.

Learn how to change how data appears in the grid by switching between Period, Variance, Stream, Total, and Transaction modes. You'll also move between Summary and Dimension views, and see how your selections and filters carry across, so you can compare the same analysis in different ways.

Learn how to change the period so you can focus on the time frame you want to review. You'll choose from available periods, select a fixed date range, and save a user-defined period with dynamic dates, so it keeps showing the latest months without you recreating it.

Learn how to tailor the grid with grid settings. You'll reverse the period order, show items with or without activity, align incomplete periods with Period to Date, and add sparklines, totals, and an Others row. You'll also see how to handle rows that net to zero and change the font size.

Learn how to save an analysis view as a favorite so you can return to it without setting everything up again. You'll see how to save, update, and delete favorites, share them with other users, save a copy as a new favorite, and subscribe to receive one by email on a schedule.

Learn how to work efficiently with the grid. You'll sort values, collapse the dimensions panel for more room, freeze property columns while you scroll, page through large result sets, and select values to see their average, count, and sum. You'll also use right-click actions and keyboard shortcuts.

Learn how to configure a database for Customer segmentation in Insights. This tutorial walks through selecting your data, setting segmentation groups, and defining Frequency, Monetary, and Recency thresholds so you can start analyzing customer behavior.

Learn how to shape the grid around your analysis by adding calculation and measure columns, applying number formats, and checking formulas in the FX bar. You'll also see how to resize, hide, duplicate, or delete columns, and save the view as a favorite to keep your changes.

Learn how to quickly create a profit and loss budget from your financial statements using one click budgeting and start working in a ready-to-use workbook.

Discover how to make your customer segmentation more accurate by using threshold sets. Learn how to customise thresholds for different groups and ensure your insights reflect how each part of your business performs.

Discover how to turn customer insights into action by identifying key segments and creating CRM tasks in bulk. This approach helps you stay organised, prioritise follow-ups, and manage customer activity more effectively.

Learn how to use the Remove customers option to exclude specific customers from Insights calculations. You’ll see how exclusions immediately affect customer counts and revenue totals, and how removing customers differs from filtering by excluding them entirely from segmentation and Insights results.

Learn how to use filtering and re-segmenting to analyse your customers from different perspectives. This tutorial explains the difference between narrowing your view and recalculating customer behavior, helping you uncover deeper insights and identify opportunities within specific areas of your business.

Learn how to answer more complex questions with advanced filters. You'll build rules from condition, focus or exclude, and keyword types, combine them with and or or logic, and group rules to create more precise queries. You'll also see how to remove rules or clear all filters.

While you likely know your top customers, those who buy less often or spend less can be easy to overlook. Customer segmentation helps you stay on top of your data by automatically analyzing buying behavior to group customers and uncover insights.

Learn how to build a nested view by dragging up to six dimensions into the nest view box, so you can expand each level to see how detail contributes to the overall result. You'll also see how to reorder or remove levels and add another dimension for more detail.

Learn how to find your way around Analytics and shape your view to answer the question you have. You'll see how the toolbar, dimensions panel, filter bar, and grid work together, and how to focus on data, filter it, nest dimensions, and open the transactions behind a result.

Learn how to compare data across two dimensions in a matrix, such as sales reps across customer types. You'll select the rows to compare, add a second dimension, and use focus and conditional formatting to refine the view. Pivot the matrix to switch rows and columns without rebuilding it.

Learn how to highlight key values in the grid with color-based rules, so trends and outliers stand out without sorting or filtering. You'll set conditions such as greater than or less than, choose background colors, and edit or remove rules. Conditional formatting is saved with favorites and carries over when you export to Excel.

Learn how to narrow the grid to the rows that matter. You'll focus on specific items, exclude data you don't need, search for matching values, and apply conditions such as greater than from the right-click menu. You'll also see how filter tags work, and how to remove one filter, clear them all, or reset.

Learn how to monitor your team's Phocas usage and gain insights into the databases they’re accessing, the favorites and dashboards they’ve created, and the queries they’ve run.

Learn how to manage default restrictions for all users with access to a database, making it easy to set up a secure, default configuration.

Learn how to manage and share favorites and dashboards with users, and discover how to subscribe them to email notifications to keep them updated on important changes in key data.

Learn how to assign and edit profiles, from organization profiles you can apply to multiple users to user specific profiles tailored to individuals.

Discover the default profiles you can assign, such as Administrator, Advanced, Basic, and Viewer, and find out how you can create custom organization profiles to better suit your needs.

Learn how to organize user favorites and dashboards into folders within a database. Discover how to create, rename, or delete folders and manage access permissions for each one.

Learn how to save time by applying settings, permissions and database restrictions to multiple users at once using Bulk Update. This is often the next step after importing users.

Discover how the Clone feature allows you to quickly create a new user by copying the settings from an existing user, saving you time and eliminating the need to manually configure everything from scratch.

This video for Phocas administrators takes you through some simple steps to create a new user in Phocas, including assigning a profile, giving access to a database, and cloning existing users to save time when setting up new users.

In this video for administrators, Tina shows how to use the Dynamic Month offsets option to add to the Period menu, with a date range that updates each new calendar or financial year.

As an administrator, you can control which defined periods (date ranges) appear in the Period dropdown for each database in Phocas. Learn how to create a new period with a dynamic 'offset' date range for automatic updates, or select from a list of pre-built periods.

Learn how to create a working days calendar to exclude non-working days, such as weekends and public holidays, for more accurate average daily values for your users.

Learn how you can reset user passwords for single or multiple users, and force users to change passwords at their next login. 

In this video for administrators Tina shows how to add a defined period using a special offset that matches a day with a corresponding day in a previous month.

Learn how to apply user restrictions in Phocas to control what data individuals or groups can access, so you can ensure users only see the information relevant to their role.