Making business decisions without proper insights is like building a house without a foundation. Why would we say that? In today’s dynamic business context, all aspects like inventory, supply chain, and distribution do not function separately anymore. All of them are interwoven nowadays and a thorough look into all of them will make your path easy for wise decision making.
Sales and inventory reports do the same thing for your retail store business and let’s find out the key types of sales and inventory management reports for retail stores you can generate to be utilized in the decision-making process.
Before digging any deep soil, let’s understand what exactly these reports are.
Keeping track of Reporting and analytics is essential to any type of business because it tells you exactly what is going on at a given point and it also helps you make connections and analyze trends.
Moreover, analyzing data patterns will help you make well-informed decisions around operations like inventory re-order, promotion planning, staffing, and user permissions.
However, if you were to make decisions on pure numbers, it could overwhelm you and even mislead you.
That’s why, among many other things, data should always be paired with a certain element of experience and implementation skill.
However, we are here to help you with the data extraction part, with the least hassle and many visually pleasing reports to take in information in bite-sized pieces.
In the below section, let’s look at these essential types of reports that suit any type of retail store.
Inventory keeps the business going, whether you are an online business with physical stock or a drop shipping business, managing inventory on behalf of other vendors.
Furthermore, you would always want to know how the inventory movement took place over a period.
Out-of-stock is not a good situation to be in if you are in direct retail business. Especially if you are a pharmacy or grocery store, YOU KNOW WHAT IT MEANS!!
Prevent this by using inventory management software that allows you to detect low stock levels.
Inventory expiry reports Low stock reports are useful because you can understand the current stock in hand and how much has expired.
Having the number of goods expired displayed alongside the status of GRN quantity prevents you from overstocking. This might also help you spot patterns around which products are running low constantly adjusting reorder points.
Let’s find out the consequences of having expired stocks in your retail store,
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.
These types of reports answer the following questions.
These are a few of the questions that can be answered by the product performance report. Ideally, this report should tell you how much inventory was sold in each shop over time.
These results can be combined in considering bundled offers and combos as well as planning for promotions.
A good product performance report should also give you the total shelf life. If there is a larger gap between goods received and the last item sold, you should consider re-ordering capacity.
However, there is a possibility there could be a difference if you have shops in multiple locations.
By pairing it with the sales by Category report, you can also gauge pairing to increase sales.
Note: If you’re using SalesPlay and want an overview of how to use your inventory on hand and low stock report, we’ve put together a handy video here:
If you are functioning multiple shops with the same inventory, transferring goods between these locations can be tracked by the TOG report.
You should be able to understand the date the transfer was initiated and the date it was received. Ideally, to prevent over transfers or loss of transfer there should be a status tab on each transfer that helps you understand and inform the teams about its status.
When you run physical inventory in your shop all suppliers will expect the consignment to be initiated with a Purchase Order.
Given 100 such suppliers operating within your business in multiple locations, you need software to keep track of goods received and pending.
The GRN notes report in the inventory management software should be a tool to empower your entire inventory management cycle efficiently.
Ideally, understanding the status if it's completed/ pending or canceled will save you a load of time and money.
Are you running multiple shop locations?
Then these reports are especially for you!
If you have multiple shops spread across a few geographical locations, the shop-wise sales reports will help understand which shops tend to adopt and blend in with a unique caliber of craters and the products associated with them.
For example, a food truck chain will have hot dogs and sandwiches selling faster in a fast urban area but dinner packs selling faster in a residential area.
This report gives you an overview of your sales for a given period.
It extracts data from the past receipts you have generated.
Your sales report should also show your cost of goods sold, gross profit, 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, the number of discounts that were given etc. These numbers offer some general insights into the health of your business, and they can inform your medium to long-term decisions.
This type of report makes it easy to identify your best (and worst) selling product categories. So, you can 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. As well as understand product parting for seasonal promotions or price promotions.
What this means is that a restaurant in Texas can gauge the movement of cool drinks and ice creams higher during summer and stock up accordingly while its branch outlet in Australia would stop up on soups and hot chocolate within the same period.
Stylish Blooms, an Australian-based flower shop has the ability to view stock and sales grouped by variation such as White roses in June and Red roses in February.
This allows them to plan for promotions, stock up accordingly, and understand profitably from each outlet.
Sales by category will offer your retail business the following benefits
The process for generating these reports will depend on your POS or retail management system.
In the section below, we are sharing a few general tips and information to keep in mind:
A cloud-based system lets you track your business from anywhere (if 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.
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.
This means you should have the ability to
Anytime anywhere in the presence of an active network. It should also make it possible for you to view real-time data and access reports through the cloud accounting software.
Make sure your retail POS or inventory software lets you use reports and understand deeper insights 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.
Rather than just giving general sales reports, your analytics platform should also have the option to filter the data — i.e., by product type, category, etc.
If you opt for a POS system, it will serve you as a fortress of security to safeguard transactions and customer data. Its advanced encryption features act like an impenetrable shield against cyber threats, ensuring that only authorized personnel can access sensitive information.
Your POS system is more like a digital guardian, providing a trustworthy and secure shopping experience for businesses and customers alike.
When it comes to SalesPlay POS, it is a Cloud-based software that gives you a unique role-based access control.
Whenever you need clarity on a function or a goal like transferring a Purchase Order based on a GRN or how to get a report of creditors you can reach out to our customer success teams on social media or email and we will reach out for help.
Since you have read this full article, you know how important it is to generate different sorts of reports for your retail business, especially when you are initiating marketing and sales campaigns. You no longer have to worry about this challenge as a cutting-edge solution like a POS system is there to support you throughout the year and for all business seasons.
