Please visit our new TrackAbout Knowledge Base at https://supportkb.trackabout.com for the most-up-to-date documentation on TrackAbout and TrackAbout Mobile.
Customer Audit
Introduction
TrackAbout provides a feature for visiting a customer's location and performing a physical audit of all assets on premises. Such an audit benefits both you and your customers in that everyone is assured that customer balances are accurate.
Physical Audit with Mobile Devices
One or more client employees armed with mobile devices running TAMobile descend upon a customer location. The employees go room by room, building by building, scanning every asset they can find using the Customer Audit feature of TAMobile. If they find assets that do not have barcodes but which are definitely owned by the distributor, they can perform an Add New action to enter them into the TrackAbout system on the spot. When the employees return to the branch, they sync their scanners. This creates one or more Customer Audit records in the system (and possibly some Add News).
Create Audit on Trackabout Website
A client admin logs in to the web site to reconcile the audit.
1. The first step is to create an Audit via the Create New Audit page. You will be walked through the process step by step. Enter a name for the new audit grouping which is just for internal recognition. Then put a check mark in the box in front of all the Ungrouped Audit Record(s) which should go in this grouping. Click on the Next Page button. All audits which are combined in one grouping will be assigned to the same customer account.
TrackAbout then analyzes all the assets in the collection as a unit. TrackAbout compares the assets actually found on-site against what is supposed to be on-site.
Resolving Discrepancies
Discrepancies between expected and actual are called out during the audit reconciliation process on the Incomplete Audit Summary page.
This page will display several columns:
Expected: This column shows how many of each type of asset TrackAbout expected the Customer had prior to the Audit.
Found: This column shows how many of each type of asset was actually found during the course of the Audit.
Difference: This column shows the difference between how many of each type of asset were expected before the Audit, and how many were actually found during the Audit.
Not Found Unique Assets (AKA Lost Assets): This column displays how many unique assets were expected at the Customer site, but were not found during the course of the Audit.
Surprise Finds: This is the number of assets which were found at the Customer site, but it wasn’t known that this Customer had these assets prior to the Audit.
Click on Reconcile This Audit to deal with discrepancies found by the system and to appropriately adjust the customer's balance.
Suprise Finds
The surprise finds page lists barcode numbers that were found on this customer’s balance that were not on it before the audit.
The employees performing the physical audit may have had instructions to recover any Surprise Finds, or not. Therefore the admin might choose to add the Surprise Finds to the customer's balance (to be charged rent), or not.
Lost Assets
There are 3 options for how to handle these not found assets. If there are more than one not found, the same option must be applied to all of the not found.
Basically, they must all either be left on the balance or all marked as lost (which takes them off of the balance). Marking a customer as responsible simply means that this asset will appear on the Lost and Found report on the dashboard whenever it turns up. The report will note that the tank was lost when out to this customer. Basically 1 equates to Take off balance and call it a wash. 2 to mark the assets as lost and not charge customer anymore for rent, but will charge them for the lost asset (if scanned in future, this will show up in the lost and found on the dashboard), 3 to keep charging them (hardly ever selected).
For instance, the admin might mark Not-Founds as "Lost", and he might choose to make the customer responsible for the loss of those assets. The distributor and the customer will negotiate outside of TrackAbout any fees or charges that might need to be levied due to lost assets.
Audit Completion
Upon successful reconciliation of the audit, a reconciliation report is generated and stored in the system. The customer's balance may have been modified as a result of how the admin decided to reconcile the audit.