Introduction
Importance of reporting in tracking sales cannot be overemphasized. Weekly or monthly sales reports are once in a while activities, but daily sales report (DSR) is something which gives you a pulse over sales & revenue on a more granular basis. This report helps you to analyze day-to-day activities in the business helping you to identify operational bottlenecks at grassroot level. Automated daily sales reporting is more than what its name suggests – it includes key performance indicators (KPIs), metrics on sales goals, sales volume, & also prediction about the upcoming sales. One thing which should be always kept in kind is that DSR is not just a mechanical thing, getting at the top of the daily sales reporting is very important if you want to work more efficiently, make better decisions, and see your organization growing. So, here’s for top strategies for great daily sales reporting.
- Make it goal oriented
You will have to know your goals. Daily sales reporting is not just another task to complete before the end of day. The goal of the daily sales reporting is to inform & communicate important information to all the stakeholders. You will have to always keep in mind what you are trying to achieve. Going by the name itself, sales is an important consideration, but what has to be planned to accomplish in route to that – more sales enquiries? more calls per day? The better you are sensitized about the goals of your company, the more you will be able to get out of your reports.
- Choose the right tool
Technology has added another ‘A’ to the DSR. Now it’s ADSR – Automated Daily Sales Reports. The bottom line is, you will have to find the right software to present the most appropriate sales reports. These days, numerous automated daily sales reporting software solutions are available which offer hundreds of daily sales reports, but you will have to choose the most appropriate software. Select a tool, which is highly intuitive & presents data in easily comprehensible & assimilable format. One ADSR software which comes to our mind is WovVRA – this amazing cloud-based solution from WovV Tech has a very helpful ADSR feature touching every nook & corner of your daily sales.
- Consistency
Comparative analysis generates great insights, but for that you will have to keep the reports consistent. While technology will ensure that they are generated around the same time, that they present information in the similar format, they highlight the same metrics, & the key parameters are comparable across time, you will have to ensure that the right information is fed into the reporting system. Here, the role of the manual sales data uploading also becomes important. You will have to ensure that your ADSR software for shopping malls or other industries has the provision of manual upload of missing data, reconciliation for unmatching data & others.
- Customizable reports
Is it possible to tailor-made the reports to meet the requirements of different stakeholders? Yes, it definitely is. The modern-day tools have the provision to customize the reports to meet specific requirements of accurate sales reporting. They are highly interactive, you can simply drag & drop the fields & columns to design a report of your choice. Because, what matters is what one wants to get from the report. So, for example, your marketing team might be interested in the front end sales metrics while the top executive might be interested in the parameters which affect the bottom-line.
- At a glance reporting
Remember not everyone in your organization will have time to go through tons of records that may be there in the sales reports. This is especially true for high-level managers. For them, you will have to create high-level reports. Such reports will offer the key metrics in just a couple of bulleted points. The rest of the reports might have detailed information for the lower level sales executive who deep dive into the data. ADSR software should also support shopping centre tenant centre integration.
- Graphical reporting
A picture is worth a thousand words. Most people are visual learners. It has been scientifically proven that visuals are not only easy to comprehend but are also easy to retain. Sales trends for the last month, share of a particular product in the sales volume – these are some metrics which are difficult to comprehend in the pure number format. Hence, such reports should be better presented in the graphical format.
- Automation
This goes without saying one of the most important things to look for in your daily sales report. What more can we say about the importance of automation than the name DSR itself has given way to a more modern & realistic name ADSR (Automated DSR). Benefits of the automation are manifold – it saves time, it eliminates manual error, it brings efficiency & many more. A few minutes here & there may not look like a big deal, but it slowly adds up. Try to automate every component of the daily sales reporting from data collection to report generation to distribution. It is an important desirable feature of the shopping mall revenue assurance software.
- Answer the ‘why’ & not just the ‘what’
The answer to the ‘what’ question is not going to lead you anywhere, you must come up with the answer to the ‘why’ question as that’s what will help you to solve the problem. So, rather than just informing you that the daily sales of a particular product is going low, the report should also answer why the sales are low, & for that there could be a provision to drill down on the data.
Conclusion
You will have to keep this one thing in mind that you may not get the daily sales report right on the first occasion. You will have to work towards improving it, & you can do so by getting feedback on the reports from all the stakeholders. You will have to present these reports to the senior management & also the marketing department & get their opinion on what they think about it. Have they something to say about the new data points which you can include in your reports, & the new ways in which you can package & present your report. We have already mentioned the name of the advanced sales analytics software for shopping malls which we recommend – WovVRA, this software is available in FREE-FOREVER format, & it will help you to provide higher management with better data & help the organization work more efficiently.
