One useful exercise that you will find is to make a list of reports, that are relevant to you and set up a regular period, I suggest monthly to review these reports. Since our reports take less than a minute to run, unlike other systems, there is no limit for the number of reports you can run.
Once you do this you will find that your point-of-sale system information is a gold mine for discovering real insights into your business that can improve your decision making. However, keep in mind that the information has to be as good as the information you give it. For example a report of the monthly stock movements if you are returning large quantities of these goods for this month, is going to be misleading. The information needs to be up-to-date. Another example would be that your clients according to a study I saw recently showed that 50% of Australian will move every six years. The old clients in your system possibly do not live there any more. It's quite possible that they have changed their telephone numbers, email address, etc.
Furthermore, it needs to be accurate. An accidentally scanning a barcode in the pack size of a stock item was something we discovered today in an old client's database. This resulted in a pretty weird figure in the stock on hand figure.
Here are four questions you need to ask yourself of your information before you run your monthly reports.
1. Is your information accurate?
2. Is your information completed, is almost all the stock being scanned or is it being run up as department keys?
3. Is it up-to-date?
4. Is it consistent, it's not good practice to sell say most of an item sales as "$4 less 50%" and the rest as $2? This is going to cause problem with your reporting.
