However, if you are in January 97, the current sales file would contain February 96 through January 97. Sales from Jan 95 to Dec 95 would be in the 95 file and sales from January 96 would be in the 96 file.

Most parts of the program work with the current sales file, including the itemized sales reports [6,2,3]. However, [6,2,3] also allows you to run the report against a multi-year sales file. Some parts of the program let you pick a specific yearly sales file to look in, such as the [6,2,2] sales reports or the [1,B] & [6,A] customer histories.

Note that if you want to check a customer history and want to see sales over eleven months old, you should choose Customer Buying Histories [6,A] and choose to view ALL years by pressing A when prompted.)

The multi-year sales file is a single large sales file which incorporates all the yearly archive sales files plus the current sales files. It is very useful when you want to run sales reports for old dates or for a date range which cuts across two or more individual sales files.

The multi-year sales file is not continuously maintained — it’s only refreshed when you choose to re-create it. You can create the multi-year file by choosing option Y from the [6,2,3] sales report screen. In general it is best to let the program choose all years from 86 through Current even if you haven’t had the Jewelry Shopkeeper since 1986.

If right now, you wanted to run a 6,2,3 report for very old dates such as August 95 or June 94, you might not really need to recreate the multi-year file if you have already created multi-year file since you couldn’t have made changes to sales that old. However, if you want to run a report which includes more recent dates you might want to recreate the multi-year file and, besides, it never hurts to recreate the multi-year file except for the time it takes.