Does anyone else struggle with the disconnect between Course price and Order total on the orders report? It’s difficult to get an accurate picture of income from courses when the Order total may include things other than the specific course in question, or when there are two or more children that are paid for on the same order.
I’m looking at an orders report right now for a set of recordings that can be purchased individually or as a block (for a lower price than the sum of the children), where someone purchased two children on a single order. On the report, she has two lines (one for each course purchased), and BOTH LINES have $50 for Course price (correct) and $100 for the Order total, when in fact there was a single order for $100. Then there’s someone who purchased a single course for $50, but who purchased something else entirely, so the Course price is $50 (correct) and the Order total is $395.
Some people got a coupon code to use to get their recordings for free, so I can’t use the Course price as an accurate number, and because of the above situations I can’t add up the Order total column and get a correct number, either.
Does anyone else get frustrated by this? There is SO MUCH manual work required to get an accurate financial picture in these situations. Does anyone have any thoughts? I’m DYING here.
YES YES YES. We have learned to live with it for the most part, but a clear view of revenue from a course is not readily available. This is especially important for us because our office serves the entire medical school, so individual departments actually “own” the activity, not us, and they need an accurate picture of how much money they are making for that activity. We have a lot of manual stuff we do at the end for the close out report. Currently not a lot of people are purchasing more than one course at a time, but I see this changing as time goes on. I understand the logic behind why it needs to be this way, some of it stemming from the flexibility of coupons (for example a person can get $100 off if their total is more than $750… so then from what courses does that $100 come off?) -but we never use coupons that way - they are always course specific…
Same here. Coupons are course specific and never global, and I doubt we’d ever have a global coupon.
For two really small orders reports (fewer than 100 lines each) I have been forced to spend at least an hour each figuring out exact numbers. I have to figure out who had multiple purchases and odd totals, look up the orders to see what’s on them, and do a whole new spreadsheet that reflects the accurate info.
Same. I do monthly registration reports for our finance director and I spend a minimum of an hour and a half cleaning the report. Fortunately, we don’t get ALOT of multi-course buys, but I definitely deal with the discount code issue. We use them alot and more than one at a time so I really hate how one order ends up on two or three lines.
And someone who purchased one child from the 2017 parent and one child from the 2018! ARGH! If these were large reports I think I’d be going postal about now.
I may never say this again, but I’m actually glad so much of our content is free, after all.
This is why we refrain from using coupons. They make the financials so difficult.
Sometimes, in order to make EthosCE data usable, I parse through it with code that runs totals, and differentiates parents from children (so we don’t count stuff twice). It is a real challenge.
I think course completion reports should be based on children, not parents, as the credit award date is not accurate if a person does a series of children over a span of a couple of years. Right now, the report gives us only the first completion date. Not really that accurate. Grouping and counting separate children based on SKU would be SOOO much easier. We don’t need parent information. Or at least give us a second report for parent totals.
Order reports should be the same. Child by child. No clumping together, but carrying the OrderID so we can manipulate totals if we need to.
We have some things where people can buy the parent OR individual children. If they buy the parent they’re auto-enrolled in the children, so no order is associated with the children at all. I can’t imagine it would be feasible to give each child the parent order number in those cases.
