The inventory performance report allows you to compare products, product categories, brands, suppliers, and SKUs. By comparing these metrics, you can better understand what is selling well and what’s not moving, to help inform your purchasing strategy.

You can use this report to:

• Consider changes to your product range. Analyze which products and brands bring in customers so you can stock what sells and put less focus on items that bring in less profit.
• Prepare for a bulk or seasonal purchase of products. Analyze the past performance of similar products to optimize your future orders.
• Plan your promotions. See where you’re overstocked to figure out which products might need a helping hand to move them on.

What can it tell you?

The report combines your Inventory levels, Sales information and some key performance indicators to help you discover which stock is flying off the shelves and what needs attention.

• Closing inventory. Your Inventory at the end of your selected date range. If that is today then it equals your current stock on-hand.
• Gross profit. The total profit you made (Revenue - Cost of goods sold = Gross profit). This is sorted by most to least so you can see what is putting the most money in your pocket. NOTE: Gross profit relies on you recording your product costs in Retail POS, otherwise it will be the same as your revenue.
• Items sold. The total items you sold in your selected date range.
• Items sold per day. The average daily sales in your selected date range. This lets you look at the rate a specific product has sold in the past. If you need to compare recent spikes in sales or understand how something performed last season, use this to confirm your gut feeling. (Items sold / No. of days in selected period = Items sold per day).
• Sell-through rate. This tells you the rate you are selling your inventory. A high sell-through rate means items are flying off the shelves and might need to be replenished. A low sell-through rate means items are sitting around and tying up your cash.
• Days cover. This tells you where you might be over or understocked. It looks at your items sold per day and your closing inventory to calculate how many days it will take to sell out.
• Inventory cost. This is an indicator of how much cash you have tied up in your Inventory. (Average cost x Closing inventory = Inventory cost).
• Retail value. This tells you how much potential revenue your inventory could make. Use it to help plan upcoming promotions, insurance claims and merchandising. (Full retail price of Products x Closing inventory = Retail value).

Check out how you can customize your inventory reports.

Tips on using the performance report

Focus on what your customers love

Go to Reporting > Inventory reports and select the Performance tab. Add the optional measure Customer count (click + on the right side of the report table to access additional measures). Once the report displays, click on underlined column names to sort by that column. Now you can see how many unique registered customers bought the product in the selected period.

Take a look at what’s not going well

It can be a job you put off but everyone has some purchases that just don’t work out. Take a look at the bottom performers in your store by changing the way they are sorted to ascending (i.e. smallest first). Click on the Gross Profit column header to switch between showing the highest contributors first or the lowest. This works for any of the underlined columns.

Think about introducing a different way of selling these poor-performing items or maybe a promotion to move them along. Then you can invest your money in something else.

Determine the value of your stock on hand

If you want to view at a glance the value of your inventory, you can format your report type as SKU and change your measure to On hand inventory. This will show you a breakdown of how much stock you have and the value, excluding stale products or items that have negative or zero inventory. 

Further refine the report by formatting the report by outlet if you have more than one. 

This can give you an idea of how much value is in your inventory, along with the potential retail value, to help you make decisions about current and future inventory budget.

Investigate a whole category or brand

If you want to do a comprehensive review across categories or brands then start at the top before you dig deeper. Change the Report type to Brand or Product category to compare them and then add filters as required to focus on the performance of a specific brand or tag.