F2 · Foundations · 30 minutes
Inquiry, Lookup, Reports & Printing Basics
The skills you'll use a hundred times a day — looking things up, reading inquiry screens, running reports, and getting them where they need to go.
What you'll learn
- Customer, Vendor, and Item inquiry — how to look up the basics without changing anything
- How to read inquiry screens and understand what each tab is showing
- How to drill from a summary down to the source transaction
- Running reports: standard reports, options, and date ranges
- Saving reports to PDF or exporting to Excel
- How Paperless Office stores PDFs of what you print
1. Inquiry tasks vs. Maintenance tasks
Before you open anything: understand the difference between an Inquiry and a Maintenance task.
- Maintenance tasks let you change data. Customer Maintenance, Item Maintenance, Vendor Maintenance — you can edit records here.
- Inquiry tasks are read-only. Customer Inquiry, Item Inquiry, Vendor Inquiry — you can look but you can't break anything.
If you just want to look something up, always use the Inquiry task. There's no risk of accidentally changing a credit limit, a price, or anything else.
Rule of thumb
Use Inquiry by default. Only open Maintenance when you actually need to edit. Some of you won't have access to Maintenance tasks at all — that's intentional.
2. Customer Inquiry — the tour
Open Accounts Receivable → Main → Customer Inquiry. Pick a customer (use F2 to look one up). You'll see a screen with several tabs — each shows a different slice of information about that customer.
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Customer Inquiry — Main tab
Open AR → Main → Customer Inquiry, pick any active customer, and screenshot the Main tab. The customer name, address, contact, terms, and credit limit should be visible. Pick a customer whose data you don't mind being seen in training.
What's on each tab
- Main — the basics: name, address, contact, salesperson, terms, credit limit.
- Additional — secondary info: tax schedule, freight method, statement options, comments.
- Statistics — historical totals: YTD sales, last invoice date, average days to pay, high credit. Great for a quick "are they a big customer?" check.
- Invoices — all open invoices for the customer, with aging.
- Transactions — paid invoices and recent payment history.
- S/Os — open sales orders for this customer.
- Contacts — additional people at the customer (AP contact, shipping contact, etc.).
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Customer Inquiry — Invoices tab showing open invoices
Same Customer Inquiry screen, but switch to the Invoices tab. Pick a customer who has a few open invoices so the screen is populated. This is the tab CSRs and accounting will use most.
3. Drill-down — following the trail
Inquiry screens in Sage 100 are connected. If you see an invoice number, an order number, or a check number on one screen, you can usually drill into it — double-click, or right-click → Drill Down — and Sage opens that specific record.
Example flow: A customer calls asking about a payment. From Customer Inquiry → Transactions tab → double-click the check → you're now looking at the cash receipt detail. From there you can see exactly which invoices that check paid.
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Drilling from an invoice line into invoice detail
From Customer Inquiry → Invoices tab, double-click any invoice row. Screenshot the invoice detail screen that pops up. (If a different drill action makes more sense in your install — e.g., right-click → Drill Down — capture that flow instead.)
Try the right-click menu
Right-click almost anywhere on an inquiry screen and you'll see options like
Drill Down,
Memo, or
View Paperless Office Document. The right-click menu is the hidden treasure of Sage 100 — explore it.
4. Item Inquiry & Vendor Inquiry
The structure is the same as Customer Inquiry — open the task, pick a record, click through the tabs. Once you've toured one, you've basically toured them all.
For Redi-Bag's day-one workflows, the most useful inquiry tabs are:
- Item Inquiry → Quantity tab: on-hand, on-order, committed, available. The number you almost always want is "available," not "on-hand."
- Item Inquiry → Where Used tab: which orders this item is on right now.
- Vendor Inquiry → Invoices tab: what we owe and when it's due.
- Vendor Inquiry → Statistics tab: how much we've spent with them YTD.
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Item Inquiry — Quantity tab
Open Inventory Management → Main → Item Inquiry, pick an item with some real inventory, and switch to the Quantity tab. The on-hand / on-order / committed / available numbers should be visible.
Try it during the session
Pick a customer you know and use Customer Inquiry to find: (1) their credit limit, (2) how much they owe right now, and (3) the date of their last payment. Then drill into one of their open invoices.
5. Running reports
Every module has a Reports folder with standard reports. Reports open in a selection screen where you set the date range, filters, and other options — then you click Print, Preview, or Output to PDF.
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A report selection screen — Open Sales Order Report or similar
Open any standard report (e.g., Sales Order → Reports → Open Sales Order Report). Screenshot the selection screen before running the report — show the options like Sort, Selection Criteria, Print/Preview/PDF buttons.
The three output options
- Print — sends straight to a printer.
- Preview — opens the report on screen first (you can then print or export from the preview).
- PDF — saves a PDF directly (or routes through Paperless Office, see below).
Default to Preview
Always click
Preview first. If it looks right, you can print or save from there. Going straight to Print means burning paper on reports that often need to be re-run with different filters.
Saving filters and selections
Reports you run often (like AR Aging) usually have the same options every time. Set up the report the way you want, then click Save at the top of the selection screen. Give your saved setup a name. Next time you run that report, pick your saved setting from the dropdown and you're ready to go.
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Saving a report with a named setting
On any report selection screen, click Save (usually a button at the top or in the menu). Screenshot the dialog that lets you name the saved setting. Bonus: a second screenshot showing the saved setting in the dropdown next time the report is opened.
6. Exporting to Excel
Almost any Sage report can be exported to Excel for further analysis or reformatting. From the Preview window, look for an export icon (usually an Excel-shaped icon or a "Save As" / "Export" menu). Pick Excel as the format and save the file.
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Exporting a previewed report to Excel
Preview any report, then click the Export icon (the green/Excel icon in the preview toolbar). Screenshot the export-format dialog or the resulting saved file.
Two Excel export options
Most reports give you two Excel export choices:
Excel (Data Only) and
Excel (Formatted). Use
Data Only when you need clean rows for sorting, filtering, or pivoting. Use
Formatted when you need the report to look the same in Excel as it does in Sage.
7. Paperless Office
Sage 100 has a feature called Paperless Office that automatically saves a PDF copy of certain documents (customer invoices, statements, AP checks, purchase orders, etc.) every time they're printed. You can find these PDFs later without having to re-run the print.
To pull up a saved document, go to Paperless Office → Main → Customer Viewer (or Vendor Viewer, Period End Report Viewer, etc. depending on what you're looking for). Pick the customer/vendor and you'll see a list of PDFs that have been generated.
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Paperless Office — Customer Viewer with a few stored documents
Open Paperless Office → Main → Customer Viewer, pick a customer who has at least a couple of invoices/statements already stored. Screenshot the list of documents and (if possible) the preview of one of them.
Don't rely on it for things you haven't enabled
Paperless Office only stores documents from the forms/reports that have Paperless turned on in their setup. For Redi-Bag we'll have it set up for customer invoices, statements, AP checks, and POs at minimum. If you need a PDF of something that
isn't in Paperless, you'll have to re-run the report and save it manually.
Quick reference cheat sheet
Just looking? Use Inquiry.
Customer Inquiry · Vendor Inquiry · Item Inquiry — never changes data.
Drill down
Double-click or right-click → Drill Down. Follow the trail.
Item available qty
Item Inquiry → Quantity tab → "Available" (not "On Hand").
Open invoices for a customer
Customer Inquiry → Invoices tab.
Always Preview first
Don't go straight to Print. Preview → check → then print/export.
Save report settings
Set up filters, click Save, name it. Reuse next time.
Export to Excel
From Preview → Export icon → Excel (Data Only) for analysis.
Find an old invoice/check PDF
Paperless Office → Customer Viewer (or Vendor / Period End Viewer).
Frequently asked
What's the difference between "on hand" and "available"?
On hand = physically in the warehouse. Committed = on open sales orders, can't be sold again. Available = on-hand minus committed plus on-order (depending on your settings). When somebody asks "can we ship 500 of this today?" — the answer comes from available, not on-hand.
The report opened but it's blank — nothing on the page.
Almost always a selection-criteria issue. Re-open the report and check: (1) the date range — did you pick a range with no data? (2) any "Selections" filter — is it excluding everything? Reset filters to wide-open ranges first, then narrow down.
I exported to Excel and the numbers are stored as text.
That's a common Sage export quirk. Use Excel (Data Only) instead of Excel (Formatted) — Data Only gives you cleaner number formatting. If it still happens, in Excel you can select the column, click the warning triangle, and pick "Convert to Number."
I can't find a customer's invoice from 2 years ago.
Paperless Office keeps documents indefinitely unless Tom has set a retention policy. Try Customer Viewer with a wider date range. If it's truly not there, the invoice still exists in Sage — you can re-print it from AR → Main → Reprint AR Invoices.
Can I run a report against last year's data?
Most reports let you. Look for a Period or Fiscal Year selection in the report options. For historical inventory or AR aging, there are dedicated retroactive reports (and Redi-Bag has a separate Sage add-on called SageInventory_PLUS for historical inventory snapshots — Tom will demo that separately).