Tidy up old products and inactive customers

Over time you may end up with an extensive customer list with customers who haven’t been back for years, or products you added years ago but no longer sell. Synergy includes some handy tools to keep your database in a healthy/tidier state. This guide will show you how.



IMPORTANT
Before undertaking any of these procedures, we recommend you make a full system back-up, just in case you make a mistake or accidentally clean out more than you really intended!
If you have been using your Synergy system for 12 months or less, it’s probably not worth doing this housekeeping, as you may have imported data and end up removing products you just hadn’t used yet or customers who hadn’t returned since your program was installed .


Clean-up your Products List



Synergy has a ‘stale stock’ function that allows you to identify products in your database that haven’t sold since a specified date.

For example, if you wanted to tidy up (discontinue) products that haven’t been sold in the last 2 years, here’s how you would do it:

  1. Go to Marketing/Reports
  2. Select the Product Sales tab
  3. Double-click Stale Stock Reporting
  4. This will load the Stale Product list, simply type a date 2 years ago into the ‘Last Sale Since’ field and the products listed will be all the products you have not sold since the specified date:
  5. Here you could export the list to Excel using the Green icon (bottom left) if you wish to analyse the info further, Print or Preview a report or do what we came here for… clean them up.
  6. To discontinue these products, click the ‘Select All’ option at the top


NOTE: Depending on the tidiness and general accuracy of your stock holdings, you may wish to un-tick any items with a non-zero ‘Stock Qty’ figure and deal with those manually outside of this process


  1. When the products to be ‘tidied’ are all selected, click the ‘Discontinue’ button at the bottom of this form to finalise the process and discontinue the products

Clean-up your Client List


Very similar to the process for cleaning up products; here’s how to clean up your customer list.

In this example we will be cleaning up (discontinuing) all customers that have not transacted with us for 5 years.

Handy Tip – this is located under the ‘Marketing’ tab, as the real opportunity with this feature is to identify customers that haven’t been in for some time, and direct marketing to these customers to try bring them back!

  1. Go to Marketing/Reports
  2. Select the Marketing tab
  3. Double-Click Inactive Clients
  4. Enter the Inactive Since date (so in this scenario, a date 4 years prior to todays date)
  5. If you were marketing to these customers, you would use the functions at the bottom of the Inactive Clients form to either export to Excel, or Email/Text etc but in this scenario, we’re here to clean…
  6. To discontinue the displayed customers, click ‘Select All’ at the top of the window, filter through the list and untick any you wish to retain, then click ‘Discontinue’ in the top right to finalise the process and discontinue the old inactive customers.

Final Word

Again, we can’t stress enough the importance of backing up your data before undertaking any of these processes.

If you have any questions about this process, please contact the Support Centre by emailing support@synergy.net.nz