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What to Look For In Your Sales Report: Inventory and Returns

So you’ve got the data in hand—now what? Knowing all the key performance indicators is just the first step to optimizing the way your business functions. When you’ve got a modern point of sale, like the Poynt Smart Terminal, it can be a piece of cake to get the report in your hands; turning that data into actionable information is where the rubber meets the road, so to speak.

In order to fully grasp where all that sales data is pointing, let’s go over the basics. Depending on the point of sale software your business uses, there is a little flexibility around what kind of report is churned out. It also depends on what your business sells and how you operate. Here are some of the most common default data points, and a few action items that can be pulled from it.

  • Top selling items
  • Gross profits
  • Sales activity for the month/day, etc.
  • Sales by employee
  • Overview of discounts, coupons, promotions, etc.
  • Top returned items
  • Online and mobile sales

Inventory

Let’s talk about the top selling items, and by association, worst-selling items. Focusing too much on the successful sellers can lead to inventory inefficiencies. If you are a clothing store and it’s been a few months with minimal sales on one item, it may be time to push that item in a different way, with a promotion. Otherwise, it’s as if that item is taking up your floor space and you’re paying rent for it to be there. You aren’t a storage facility, so it’s essential to keep things moving.

An inventory app can do wonders for these things. Especially if yours is a business that moves a lot of regular merchandise, making sure that you time purchase orders accordingly can be a nightmare, with very slim room for error. What an inventory manager can do is allow you to automate the key tasks that take so much time from your day. The app can be set up to monitor purchases of any item, and you are then able to set automatic notifications for orders. They may even be set up to automatically place the order with your distributor.

Returns

Top returned items is another data point that needs your attention. Noticing a pattern of dissatisfaction means that something needs to change. It may just be that you’ll have to chock up the order of a product that was widely returned as a wash, and not order the product again.

The beginning of all knowledge for your store is the collection of strong data. The only way to do that effectively is with a POS that has the capabilities of integrating with the other tools your business uses. Talk to Moolah today to see how signing up with us can get you a Poynt Smart Terminal for free.

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