Standard Operating Procedures for Online Store

[timbeckham]

For the last two days, I've searched Wiki, the forum, and my admin system for the answers to the following questions, with no useable results. If anyone can just point me in the correct direction, I would be grateful.

 

The website we are currently developing is available for review at:

http://www.ironworktest.com

That site will eventually become ironwork.com, when we are finished filling out the product line and have all the business issues resolved. We will be selling artistic metalwork on a drop-ship basis. - We take the order, process the CC, notify the artist/blacksmith, who ships the order to the customer.

 

I'm a rank beginner in the retail world; I have never run a retail store - online or bricks-and-mortar - in my life. After 30 years of business as a manufacturers' rep, we are now getting our first sales tax license. -- So I am really starting at the beginning as a retailer.

 

Since I am so new to the retail business, I am trying to figure out how to keep on top of a variety of very elementary issues, including:

(a) bookkeeping for product inventory purchases and sales figures,

(B) sales tax collections and payments to local governments,

© freight costs - how to figure, how to offer options,

(d) customer data,

(e) more ???

 

So how do I get the data out of OSC to do this? -----

A lot of these issues could be systematically addressed, if I could get downloads of transaction data from OSCommerce for specific intervals of time. These files could be integrated into a bookkeeping system. I need daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly summaries of transaction and customer data. For example, I would like to make a daily review of the status of orders, payments, and customer activity. I cannot find a way in OSC to get date-specific data of this type.

 

I could try writing some SQL to get the data myself, and that may be what I wind up doing in the long run, anyway; but it would be much easier at this point to find solutions provided by OSC or a contributor. Maybe I'm just not understanding something, but if someone could help, it would be greatly appreciated.

 

Tim Beckham

[timbeckham]

I posted this above request under the wrong forum section. I think it should go into the "General Support" secion. Could someone please move it for me? Sorry for the inconvenience.

 

Tim Beckham

[jpf]

If your starting from scratch - try Quickbooks to manage your brick and mortar store and all your accounting books....Import from OSC into QuickBooks with this mod....

 

http://www.oscommerce.com/community/contributions,957