The following reports have the ability to change your business and the way you look at it. They will give you fresh insights into your sales and where things can be improved.
However, the value you receive from these reports depends on the management of stock in your system. If you have poor stock management, the reports will not be as useful and it will be harder to trust what the data is showing you. This means you need to have good stock control and your departments and categories need to be set up well. All stock needs to be in a department and category.
Monthly Sales Comparison
The monthly sales comparison allows you to track how your business is performing over a given time period compared to another time period, usually the same time last year. This is where you can determine year on year growth or decline and break this down to a Department and Category level. This also lets you make decisions about what areas of the business need more work to improve their growth or arrest decline as well as what is already working.
This report also includes a summary of average sales and average sale value, as well as total customer sales in the time period selected. This can be a useful report in lease negotiation.
Ranked Sales Report
The Ranked Sales Report shows your top selling items based on the settings chosen when running the report. You can run this report for as long or as little as you want. But longer time frames smooth out the averages and avoid decision making based on short term sales spikes.
Knowing your top selling items can help you assess things like where those items are physically located in the shop. Are they easily accessible? Do you have them in multiple locations to increase exposure? Are there other product opportunities that would compliment your top sellers?
We recommend running the report twice, once ranking by quantity sold and once ranking by GP, either dollars or percentage. This will often show very different results, especially with low margin product.
10 x 10 Stock Item Analysis Report
This report is similar to the Ranked Sales Report but it allows us to see the top selling items along with the items they sell with most often for a given time frame. This allows you to leverage upsell opportunities by co-locating stock that is already selling well together, as well as see how such a move has affected sales. You will often be very surprised at what is selling well together.
You can choose the number of items to display, eg it could be the top 50 items and the 3 things they each sell with most.
Basket Analysis Report
This report allows you to breakdown and compare average baskets or sales in your store for 2 date ranges. This will give you an overview of what departments, categories or suppliers are contributing the most to your overall sales. You can run this report for as long or as little as you want. But as before longer time frames smooth out the averages and avoid decision making based on short term sales spikes.
If you check the option for ‘Show Breakdown Over Days’ you will also get a breakdown of sales over each day showing the percentage each department contributes on average to each day of the week.
For example Gifts might contribute %10.6 on Mondays to overall sales but %15.8 on Saturdays.
You will also see the total number of sales for each day of the week over the time period selected as well as the average sale value per day. This can help to identify traffic trends in your store.