Apparel reporting and analytics: six ways to get a number, and which one to use

Yes. Every list screen is a grid you can filter with rules and groups, re-column, sort several levels deep, pivot by style, color or size, save as a shared view and export. There are hundreds of formatted reports for sales, inventory, production and finance with a report editor to change them, four pivot BI builders on orders, invoices, work in process and stock, and role based home screens with color flagged lists. Power BI and Live Excel are for standing dashboards and live workbooks on top of that, not replacements for it.

It depends what you mean by real time, and the distinction matters. Grids, color flags and home screens read live records on screen. A formatted report or a BI pivot is accurate as of the moment you ran it. An export is frozen at the moment you took it. Only two routes stay connected and refresh: a Live Excel workbook wired to the API, and Power BI pointed at a read only login on your database or at the REST API. If a number has to be current whenever somebody looks, it belongs on one of those two.

Anything that depends on the grain or on what is already promised. Every table is held at style, color and size, so a size curve, a color mix and a season roll-up read one record rather than three exports stitched together. And the operational tables carry allocated stock, allocated work in process and available to allocate as columns, so the figure on screen is what you can still sell, not what is on the shelf. A generic BI tool can chart whatever it is given; what it cannot do is invent a grain the underlying data never had.

Three different questions. OTS(i), immediate open to sell, is stock minus customer orders: what could ship today if every open order took its share first, which is the number for immediates and dropship feeds. OTS is stock plus work in process minus customer orders: what you can commit for a delivery once open cuts and purchase orders land. Open stock is the warehouse number, stock minus allocations, pick tickets and goods in transfer, and it ignores unallocated orders and anything in production. Most inventory arguments come from two people reading two of these.

Inside AIMS360, the style analysis reports rank styles by units sold or by how many accounts bought them, with sell price, cost, markup and margin per style, and cut and sold on one line so you can see whether you cut what you sold. For a standing chart that refreshes on its own, the same data goes into Power BI or a Live Excel workbook. For a one off question, the built in Order and Invoice BI pivots answer it without exporting anything.

No, and one is not needed. Power BI connects two ways using connectors it already ships with: a read only login to your own AIMS360 SQL database through the SQL Server connector, or the AIMS360 REST API through the web connector with a bearer token. Nothing is installed on the AIMS360 side, and there is no template pack, so the first dashboard is a build by your analyst or a Power BI partner. After that it refreshes on its own.

Not as emails from the system. A scheduled view refreshes a CSV or JSON file at a URL on the cycle you set, and sharing that link is up to you. The link runs under the permissions of whoever scheduled it, so treat it as you would the data. A one off email of a grid export from the desktop export dialog is a separate feature and does work. If you want a number that arrives current without anyone running anything, put it in Live Excel or Power BI rather than trying to schedule a report.

Four pivot table builders inside the ERP. Order BI covers booked, shipped and open orders by customer, class, season, style, rep or division, and carries what is already allocated and by what. Invoice BI covers what was actually invoiced, which is where year over year sales by customer lives. WIP BI covers cut tickets and production purchase orders in progress with allocated and available to allocate. Stock BI covers inventory by style, color and size with allocated and available. You choose what to query, run it, then drag fields into rows, columns and values until the table answers, and save the layout as a view for yourself or everyone.

It is an estimate, and it is worth knowing why. Every margin report reads the current cost held on the style master at run time, on the cost basis you choose. It does not read the actualized purchase order or the general ledger, so freight, duty and later adjustments are not in it. For actual margin, take the units and sales from these reports and the actual cost from the accounting close. A style with a stale or missing landed cost will report a margin that looks fine and is not, which is why keeping costing current matters more than the report does.

Several layers doing different jobs. Preset home screens put the modules a role uses one click away, with versions for general use, customer service, production and EDI. Color flags turn any main list screen into a status board, so overdue orders or unpaid invoices stand out by rules you set, which takes about five minutes to configure. Management dashboards show company charts. And the same live data sits behind a standing Power BI or Live Excel dashboard, or an AI assistant you simply ask.

Yes, read only. Claude, ChatGPT and Grok can connect to AIMS360 and answer plain English questions about sales, backlog, margin or receivables over live data, returning a table, a chart or a file. It is the right route for the question nobody has built a view for yet. It reads the same records and respects the same permissions as everything else on this page.

Most of it is self service. Grids, saved views, color flags and the BI pivots are built by the people who use them, with no developer and no add on. Two things are specialist: the Report Editor, which suits somebody comfortable in a report designer and where a few older reports need a Crystal Reports license bought from that vendor, and a Power BI model, which is real work in relationships, measures and a calendar table. For either, tell us what the report has to show and we can scope building it; what is available depends on your plan.

Usually five. Best sellers by units and by customer count, to separate a style that sold deep to one account from a style the whole line bought. Gross margin by style. Cut and sold, to see whether production matched demand. The season and division scorecards, since every style already carries both. And aged inventory, to find what is still sitting. All of them read the same order, invoice, production and stock records, ranked and dated, and all of them export.

No, and the export is usually the thing worth avoiding. Every grid and every BI table exports, but that file is a photograph: nothing in it refreshes. If a spreadsheet is where the work happens, the better answer is a Live Excel workbook connected to the API, so your formulas, formatting and pivots stay put while the numbers update on refresh. Export for the deck and the as-of-date analysis; connect for anything somebody rebuilds every week.