A Guide to POS Reporting: How POS Reports Drive Business Success

One feature of a POS that adds value to a business: POS reporting.

Businesses can glean tons of insightful information from a POS report, like a sales summary, and use that information to improve sales and make their business more efficient. However, if you’re new to analyzing POS data, chances are you don’t know where to begin or what to look for.

Ultimately, there are five types of POS reports you should look at:

• Accounting reports
• Sales summaries
• Inventory reports
• Employee reports
• General dashboard reports

Using data from these reports, businesses can perform a number of vital operations including inventory optimization, managing cash flow and enhancing pricing strategy.

Need some help? This guide to POS reporting will show you where to look and provide some actionable tips for using POS analytics in your business.

What POS Reports Should You Analyze?

One benefit of a POS system is that it provides your business with valuable analytics data. The key, though, is knowing what data to use and then distilling that data into insights. Here are 5 POS reports your business should be looking at:

1. General Web Reports

Your POS typically has a configurable dashboard that will provide a basic statistical report. Although you can change what data is displayed and the timeframe for reporting (or real-time reporting), there are a few key statistics to keep an eye on:

• Net sales within a specific time period (compared to percentage changes from a previous period)
• Number of transactions
• Transaction totals
• Invoice totals and deposits
• Deposits and outgoing costs

This type of data is useful for gaining a big picture of business health. A dashboard will show you if sales are increasing, if order values are increasing, or identity peak sales times.

How to Use This Data

Use the data from your POS report dashboard to perform essential operations like:

• Inventory Optimization – Determine net sales and transaction history for a specific period. This will help you understand peak sales times, trends, and popular products. Use this information to optimize inventory levels.
• Manage Cash Flow – Review deposits and cash drops, as well as outgoing costs. This provides a clearer picture of cash flow, which you can use to identity financial risks, plan major expenses, or identity areas for cost reduction.

2. POS Accounting Reports

As you consider POS software solutions, look at a platform’s accounting features. Accounting data available in a POS might include:

• Refunds
• Revenue
• Cash adjustments
• Accounts payable
• Customer deposits
• Assets and liabilities

Ultimately, look for a POS platform that allows you to create your own accounting reports and rich general ledger reports. The platform should also allow you to easily export POS data to QuickBooks or Excel. In other words, accounting reports can save you a considerable amount of time.

How to Use This Data

Businesses can use accounting reports to:

• Tax Preparation – POS accounting reports simplify the tax prep process, by providing accurate sales, expenses and inventory costs.
• Cost Control – These reports provide visibility into costs. You can use this information to determine where to reduce expenses, patterns of waste or inefficiency, or the cost-effectiveness of different suppliers.
• Financial Planning – Use POS accounting data to analyze profit margins, costs, and revenue. You can use this to make better pricing and budgetary decisions.

3. Inventory Reports

Both cloud and on premise POS systems make inventory management easier. These reports will help you understand:

• Real-time inventory levels
• Inventory summaries
• Inventory valuation
• Reorder reports

POS reporting data for inventory is extremely helpful. It will help your business understand which products drive the most sales and how quickly those products sell (with insights into daily, weekly or monthly inventory levels for particular products). This will save you trips to the storeroom, as you can access this data from anywhere.

How to Use This Data

You can use inventory data from your POS to:

• Determine Cost of Goods Sold (COGS)
• Determine at-risk products (e.g. high inventory values for perishable or electronics at risk of obsolescence)
• Identity how much cash is tied up in inventory
• Identity slow-moving products, or set-up replenish automation

4. Customer and Sales Reports

This is many business owner’s favorite report, and it’s full of useful insights. Sales data can be used to identity:

• Best- and worst-selling products
• Average order values / orders by time of day
• Sales tax breakdown
• Sales trends
• Payment preferences

If you’re running a customer loyalty program, you’ll also find customer information in these reports. This will show you how often customers visit your store, new-to-returning customer ratios, customer buying patterns, and more.

How to Use This Data

A sales summary POS report can help you:

• Avoid overstock of low-selling items
• Identity sales trends, growth and seasonality
• Predict future sales trends, better plan inventory
• Personalize marketing efforts
• Determine customer retention

5. Staff Management Reports

A POS labor report isn’t relevant to every business, but if you are using them, this type of report can help you gather vital information about your labor costs. In particular, you can look at:

• Average hours worked per employee
• Average sales / number of transactions
• Labor expenditures by job title

You can also create employee profiles which allow you to individualize labor reporting. This can help you better understand things like overtime totaled, payable hours totaled, and more.

How to Use This Data

You can use labor analytics data to:

• Identity peak and off-peak periods for business activity
• Improving productivity (e.g. identity high-performing employees)
• Managing labor costs more efficiently
• Understanding employee retention

POS Reporting Functions in FTx POS

Ready to transform your business with valuable POS data? FTx POS offers a variety of reporting tools to give you better insights into how your business is reporting.

With FTx POS, you can utilize our detailed reporting features and carry out real-time reporting and analysis with our POS system. You can schedule routine reports to run automatically, keep track of your sales and inventory in great detail, and produce preformatted reports that can be loaded into accounting software. To learn more, schedule a demo today and test drive our POS system and reporting.