Here is some monthly KPIs to consider that all retailers should measure in their shop which you should be able to get from your POS system.
Financial
1) This month the profit who can argue with that. If your accounting system is running on accrual accounting, then a measure of profit vs costs is brilliant. If not, then your accountant can make you a reasonable budget in advance of the monthly profit required. Once you have this, check how you are going.
2) This month number of sales and profit comparison to this month last year, this comparison will tell you how you are doing over time.
3) Average Profit Per Customer
(Profit from sales)/(Number of sales) I find this is a useful is measuring how my products are doing. A note here, I find old products do tend over time to drop in profit.
4) Profit per Employee
Most of your variable costs today are in employees
The number of people that entered the shop.
To get this figure, if you are in a shopping centre, it often is supplied free by centre management, if not, then you need a people counter. People counters range in price from about $50 to $6,000. There is nothing wrong with the $50 one, but it does mean that every night, someone has to record the figure, reset the counter to zero and put the result into a computer. The dearer ones do this automatically. Additionally, the cheap ones in our experience have a problem that if a family come in the counter records how many people when what it is, is one shopping unit, the dearer ones count one person, then stop counting for about 2 seconds and start up again. In practice, this tends to produce a better figure. Nevertheless, a simple one at $50, we find is giving decent numbers.
This KPI can tell you a lot. A typical question here might be that more people are coming, but they are buying not as much why or less are coming, but they are buying more again why, etc.? Are you doing something wrong in the shop front, so people are not coming into the shop?
What people also a lot is calculate the conversion rate (Number of Sales)/(Number of people that entered the shop) to determine over time, whether there is a problem with the shop or the goods in the shop and/or the performance of the staff.
Queue KPIs
I have discussed this in detail here.
These queue KPIs are critical, long or slow queues are one of the major killers of customers today particularly if you are a shop selling convenience. Say I want smokes, I can buy it in a supermarket, but I do not want to wait.
No doubt you can add a few more KPIs. If so let me know.
This sort of analysis can be done very quickly, once you get going very likely to take you ten minutes a month to do and very likely an hour to think over.
I find that hour once a month reviewing my business on an overall level is time well spent.
