While there’s a number of different data points that can help your business grow, few are as important as the insights you get back from your POS.
If you’re a retail business, analyzing sales data, inventory performances and employee sales is vital to the growth of your company. Before we dive in, what are POS reports?
What Is A Point Of Sale Report?
Point of sale (POS) reports are generated based on the data you gather from your point of sale systems. Register data and activities are tracked at a point of sale terminal, which stores data that can be used for analysis via POS reports. This POS analysis can help retailers;
- Tracking Revenue
- Analyzing Sales
- Auditing Employee Performance
- Inventory Purchases
While some companies only have a handful of products to sell, others can have thousands of products or more. Knowing how every product is performing is essential to your growth. There’s a lot of things we want to know;
- What’s our best performing products?
- Which products are selling the most?
- Which products are underselling?
- What employees are performing the best?
Fortunately for us, we have POS reports that breakdown all these different areas in your business. Our point of sale report can give us insights that allow us to make informed business decisions, make the “right” decisions. We can use this POS data to help our company grow sales.
Most importantly, we can see what’s working, what’s not working and we can build a strategy around the strengths and weaknesses of our company. You do want to make sure you get a POS system that has great reporting features.
Now, POS reports for retailers have a lot of different data points for you to analyze. While every one of them can be valuable, there’s 3 specific categories that get the most attention. Those categories are;
- Store-By-Store Sales
- Store-By-Store Inventory
- Employee Transactions
With these 3 categories, we can learn a lot and those analysis will allow us to make the right decisions for our retail business. It allows us to see which stores are performing best, store sales trends, inventory flow, how funds are flowing in the business and much more.
Now, let’s dive a little further into POS reports so we can discuss everything they can tell our business.
Simplifying Your Sales
If you’re having to track sales for 100+ different locations, 10,000 different products, it can be a hassle to say the least. While you likely have software that does most of the heavy lifting, all that data is no good to you if it’s not easily accessible. This is where POS reporting can help, implementing all of your sales data in an easy to read report. This report is known as a EDI 852 report.
When we think about sales, most imagine a transaction taking price, right? Here’s the thing you have to remember, sales can be a longer process. We’ve talked about this before in our guide on sales cycles, it’s much more than just the bartering of goods for money.
In the retail industry, sales include gift cards, discounts and returns. The right point of sale terminal reports on all of these, sale of goods, cost of goods sold (COGS), number of returns and implemented discounts.
Efficient Inventory Management With POS Reports
POS inventory reports allow retailers to see stock level data, allowing them the opportunity to account for sold/unsold inventory items. Proper inventory management is crucial to the success of your retail store. No retailer can afford profit losses, having internal processes for your inventory management is key to your success.
Tracking Employee Success With POS Reports
When you think about tracking your employee success, you likely think of “performance.” While there’s a number of different ways you can evaluate employee performance, one way is with POS reporting.
If you didn’t have POS, you’d have to use software or manually track how many goods each employee is selling. POS staff reports help you manage staff productivity and calculate commissions. Staff reports also help you identify what’s being sold and who is selling it.
Most point of sale systems have inventory reporting tools that allow to catalog stock items. This data usually includes inventory value, inventory quantity and profit margins. Using inventory reporting tools with POS reports allow you to;
- Shift Prices And Margins
- Keep Items In Stock For Top Selling Products
- Remove Items That Are Holding Shelf Space
- Identify Overperforming And Underperforming Items
Be Careful – All POS Reports Are Not Equal
While there’s a few different companies out there that offer POS reporting, many of them will overload you on the data. Here at Accelerated Analytics, we know the key metrics you need to see. Our POS reports are easy to read, easy to understand and focus on the main data points you want to see. Our POS report is easy to read and extract.
You also need to be careful when choosing your point of sale system. Sure, you want a POS system that has standard reporting features. However, you also want a POS that is easy to use and feature rich.
Standard POS System Features
Here’s some of the features you want to see in your point of sale system.
- Top Selling / Worst Selling Products
- Top Customers
- Sales By Time-Frame
- Sales By Employee
- Employee Payouts
- Hours Worked
- Shift Reports
- Voided Sales
- Discounts
- Liabilities (Example: Gift Cards)
- Refunds
- Transaction Tender
- Gross Profits
- Taxes
- Inventory Tracking
How Accelerated Analytics Can Help
Here at Accelerated Analytics, our powerful POS reports will give you the opportunity to dive deep into your POS data and efficiently analyze all the key data points that matter in your business.
If you don’t know how to use your POS data, it does you no good. Our POS reports collect all of your data, giving you an easy to read POS report.
Accelerated Analytics is currently working with point of sale data from more than 100 retailers. We can set up a new retail data source in as little as one business day and we can handle data in nearly any format including EDI 852, downloads from retailer portals, XLS, PDF, and text files.
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