3 Types of Inventory and Sales Reports to Use in Your Retail Store (2)

 

1. Sales Summary

This report gives you an overview of your sales for a given time period. Your sales report should also show your cost of goods sold, gross profit, margins, and tax, so you can have a better idea of how much money is actually going back to your business.

 

The sales summary report provides a more macro view of your retail sales. How much did you make last month or the previous month? What about your year-to-date sales compared to last year? These numbers offer some general insights around the health of your business, and they can inform your medium to long-term decisions.

 

2. Sales Report Per Product and Product Type

Having an overview of sales is great, but to get even more meaningful insights, you also need to be granular with your analytics. This is where sales per product reports come in.

 

This type of report makes it easy to identify your best (and worst) selling products, so you can determine the right course of action. If a particular product is selling well, for example, you could consider ordering more of it. On the flip side, if a product isn’t performing, then you’d want to know sooner rather than later so you can run promotions before the season ends.

 

Sales per product type, on the other hand, helps you get a handle on your revenue from a category level. This is a great report to run if you want to identify broader trends or insights.

 

Let’s say you’re a footwear retailer and you notice that a particular brand or style of shoes is quickly gaining in popularity. Or, perhaps you’ve noticed that certain shoe sizes sell more quickly. You can use those insights to influence your stock ordering and marketing decisions for the rest of the season.

 

Bells Shoes, a UK-based retailer of branded footwear is doing exactly that. Detailed reports has been a big win for them. According to the Bells Shoes team:

 

One simple, but effective, feature in [Vend] is the ability to view sales and stock grouped by variation as at SKU level. For a shoe retailer, this allows us to view sales by style, as well as sales by size/colour – something we’ve never had before.

 

3. Sales Report Per Customer or Customer Group

It’s a good idea to generate “sales per customer” or “sales per customer group” reports. This will allow you to identify your VIP customers as well as those who aren’t fully engaging with your brand, so you can tailor your marketing and communications accordingly.

 

If you know who your top customers are, you could create special VIP events or programs to drive loyalty. On the other hand, if you’re looking to engage inactive customers, this report will help you identify them easily.

 

 

Retail reporting best practices

The process for generating these reports will depend on your EPOS software or retail management system, but here are a few general tips and information to keep in mind:

 

Keep your POS and inventory management in sync – Don’t keep your data “all over the place.” See to it that your point of sale and inventory management systems are synced. The best approach is to choose a system that has POS and inventory management features available on one platform, so all your data lives in one system.

 

If that’s not possible, then you should ensure that your POS and inventory solutions are tightly integrated. You need data to flow seamlessly from one system to the next so you can easily generate accurate and up-to-date reports.

 

Arm yourself with a flexible retail analytics solution – Make sure your retail analytics solution lets you slice and dice your reports to fit your needs. If you really want to get the most out of your retail analytics, you need a system that enables you to filter and view information in different ways.

 

For example, rather than just giving general sales reports, your analytics platform should also have the option to filter the data — i.e., by product type, customer group, category, etc.

 

Make sure it runs in the cloud – A cloud-based system lets you track your business from anywhere (as long as you have an Internet connection). This is especially handy if you’re running multiple stores or are constantly on-the-go because you’ll be able to check in on your stores — and make data-backed decisions — even when you’re not there physically.

 

Picture yourself traveling to an industry trade show or expo and trying to decide which products to buy for your store. Rather than going in blind, you can just log in to your POS or inventory platform to see the products your customers can’t get enough of.

source:www.vendhq.com