Taking a long-term view of our businesses can be very productive for making strategic decisions. Here I will show you how your point-of-sale (POS) software allows retailers like you to easily visualize sales data and gain valuable insights.
The fact is that industry trends are often misleading for individual businesses, so what you need is your information. Here is how you can do it in an instant.
Visualizing Your Own Sales History
To better understand trends in your businesses, we have written graphs that can generate images from your information. These take seconds to produce. This information can be used to help you see changes over time in your operations.
How to optimise your POS system for better sales performance
What we advise people to do is to examine their sales trends over 2 and 5 years. This timescale balances daily variations with long-term movement. Conceptualising this information in monthly periods also aligns with typical business planning, as most industry standards are for these periods.
Generating Graphs From POS Software
To make such a graph, you just need to go to Cash register reports > Sales > Sales dissection monthly sales trend.
Now select by department e.g. “Newspapers”,
The first time run a graph with five years. This gives you a long-term view. Examine this graph.
Now, much has happened in the last five years, much of dubious relevance to today's retail eg COVID.
Most businesses work in the last two years
Put in the last 24 months and click on “Generate”. You will get a graph.
The great advantage of doing that is examining this year and last year for the same month. This gets you over much of the seasonality problems.
This picture is worth a thousand words.
Gaining Strategic Insights From the Long View
Taking just a few minutes here to view trends can yield hours of strategic thinking. The long-term analysis provides an invaluable perspective on areas like profitable products and the impact of external factors. Retailers can also benchmark their performance against industry reports. With POS software, informed long-term decisions become more straightforward.
In summary, our POS system equips retailers with an effortless method to audit sales histories and evaluate patterns extending decades into the past. This long view grants keen foresight into optimizing strategy amid fluctuating conditions.
