Market Segments can be used for grouping and filtering Customer related information. They are primarily used for grouping sales analysis data. You can define your market segments to suit your business.
Each Customer must belong to a Market Segment. When you create a Sales Order for a Customer the customer’s market segment is defaulted into the sales order’s market segment. The market segment on the sales order can be overridden if required. Sales reporting can be made on ‘Customer Market Segment’ i.e. the market segment as defined on the customer, or ‘Sale Time Market Segment’ – which is the market segment recorded at the time of making the sale.
You may maintain budgets per Market Segment if you wish.
In Sales Analysis, Weekly, Monthly or Yearly reporting options by Market Segment are available.
How you use market segments will depend on the type of customers you deal with. For example, you could define market segments by geographical area or by business type (demographic). There are a variety of industry classifications you could adopt from national government and international agencies that attempt to categorise the various activities into groupings.
Examples
Some typical examples of Market Segments are:
- Government, Business, Residential
- Distributor, Wholesale, Construction, Service
- Early Childhood, Primary, Secondary, Tertiary
- Manufacturing, Retail, Services, Mining, Agriculture etc.
Minimum Requirements
Market Segment is a required field on Customers, therefore you must set up at least one Market Segment.
Changing Established Data
You can add new Market Segments and change the details of Market Segments at any time.
Take care when moving a customer from one Market Segment into another as sales data summarised by Market Segment will not change to reflect the new market segment. You may want to consider changing the customer Market Segment at month end.
Panel Options
- Standard panel features
- Maintenance
- Views
- Audit – lists data changes made over time to the market segment currently being viewed
- Where used – lists customers assigned to the market segment currently being viewed
- Sales this month – shows a summary of sales for the month for the market segment currently being viewed
- Reports
- List Market Segments