I'm starting this post in hopes that there may be a way to build a dashboard (or, if not a dashboard, a report) that could provide metrics related to sales volumes by device/location of device.
Use case: We have a very porous campus, with five buildings (four of which contain exhibitions space). Visitors can enter through and purchase entry at, any one of at least three different admission desks. We are planning to open a fourth (which has been closed since the pandemic shut things down). Management would like to be able to gauge the volume of transactions happening at each desk.
As a hosted site, I wasn't able to find a reliable way to collect and present the volume of sales for memberships and tickets at each desk - there doesn't seem to be a way to make a collection of devices (like you can with NScan devices) that will deliver the total number of tickets or memberships sold on a Point-of-Sale device. Confounding the issue more is the fact that our admissions desk attendants move around - so the Seats and Tickets cube element "Created by" won't work. Someone may be at Desk 1 part of the day and Desk 2 later (to facilitate lunches and breaks). Someone suggested creating a Mode-of-Sale for each PoS location but we would end up with at least 20 MoS;s - that just seemed completely unruly.
What would be great is a way to group the computers that are at each desk into a collection and report on the membership sales and ticket sales as a percentage of the days sales for the whole campus. We've done something similar with our NScan devices, so we can see where the traffic is flowing through the exhibitions.
Is anyone doing anything like this? If not in analytics, the only way to do this might be to create a local table and build a custom report to aggregate the data but this would be perfect for Analytics, if the data elements existed in the cubes.
Any ideas or direction would be greatly appreciated.
If you are not already using the Order Category field in the orders module, you could have a category set aside for each location (and you can make it required so that it is not forgotten). That would require your sales staff to make one more update to each order, which I am sure would be at least a little annoying at first, but they would get used to it in the end and then you would at least have a standard method of returning data about which desk is selling what.
Absent that, I think all other viable solutions that occur to me have already been suggested.
John A. Moskal II
John -
I'll look into this idea. Was hoping for something more behind-the-scenes (so to speak) that didn't rely on the operator to make a selection.
Still worth trying.
Thanks.