Having good data can make a world of difference when you’re trying to make decisions for your business. Good data can help you know what product is selling really well or when it’s time to retire products that aren’t making you money.
A lot of businesses tend to overlook one of the easiest ways to see which items are most profitable, just by looking at your sales reports. The sales reports generated by your POS system can be just as valuable as inventory tracking, and drive more sales.
We understand that looking at all those numbers can give you a headache, and sometimes the information can be a little misleading. So to help you out, we wanted to go over the best ways to analyze the data from your POS system sales reports and how you can make good decisions to increase your sales.
Every point-of-sale system is a little different in how they generate and lay out their sales reports. Generally, you will find the same or similar categories across the board:
Depending on your industry different sale metrics are important. A restaurant is going to look at their sales and how many voided items they have in their POS system, where a retail store is going to want to track the number of returned or exchanged items.
For instance, let’s say you ran a sale of coats during the early fall season, you might decide to do a similar sale with the coats that were the most popular. But if you don't check your returns you may miss that a lot of a particular coat brand was returned, which is going to cost you money.
You also don’t just want to focus on your best sellers, ignoring products that are unpopular leads to a lot of inventory not being sold and you losing money on an unpopular item.
You also want to be careful and not make assumptions. If you’re a restaurant and you think one item is selling out more than another because you run out of inventory more frequently, always check your sales report to make sure that item is being portioned properly by staff and isn’t being given away for free.
Wouldn’t you like to be more confident in ordering best sellers and making sure you are making the most money possible from your business?
Reviewing reports in your point-of-sale system is something you can do with ease as long as your team is using it properly and tracking sales and returns or voided items as they come up.
You can also save a lot of money by looking at what you’re lowest performing items are and remove them, reducing wasted or unsold items.
If you’re interested in learning more about point-of-sale systems and one with good tracking features, contact us for a free consultation.
