help. Your accountant, bookkeeper, or mentor can give you a valuable perspective on these reports.
4. Other Types of Reports to Help You Stay on Top of Your Business
Just because the three financial statements you need are usually produced on a monthly or quarterly basis, doesn’t mean that you have to wait to figure out if your business is running off course. There are other reports that you can review on a daily or weekly basis that will allow you to stay on top of your business. If you have an accounting program or point of sale system, chances are these reports are all included.
4.1 Daily and weekly margin report
The margin report should indicate how profitable the business sales actually were. Alone, this report will tell you how much your business makes on a day-to-day basis. If you couple this information with your business’s budget, you will be able to see on a daily basis if your business is profitable. To do this, just use your budget and estimate how much your company has to make each day to cover the monthly business expenses. Regularly keeping up with this information will help you guide your day-to-day activities. If you aren’t seeing the profitability you were expecting, you can immediately make the course corrections necessary to become more profitable.
4.2 Daily and weekly gross revenue report
The gross revenue report shows the gross sales that the business makes each day. This report will mainly be used to communicate your sales goals to your staff and to determine how well they are doing meeting those goals. Of course, it is not always easy to determine exactly what gross revenue will result in the appropriate margin. Therefore, this report should be reviewed daily at first and compared against the margin report. If your business is meeting the sales goals you have set, your margin should be sufficient to meet the monthly overhead. If your margin is lower than expected, you can immediately adjust the sales goals or make other business changes to prevent a loss for the month.
4.3 Detailed inventory report
If your business requires you to keep inventory, it is important to manage it correctly and track it regularly. If you do not have products available for sale, you risk losing the sale. Depending on how much your company stocks and how quickly the stock runs low, you may need to review your inventory every day, but probably not less frequently than every week.
Of course, a report is only as good as the data in the report. As part of your inventory management, make sure you are doing a full manual inventory at least once every quarter or else these reports could be providing poor or misleading information.
4.4 Customer surveys
Another way to get quick information about what your customers like, dislike, and want is through brief customer surveys. These surveys can be formal, with a customer survey form included at the register, available online, or even as a flyer included with all purchases. Or, they can be informal, conducted by you alone on an as-needed basis. However you choose to do it, getting your customers’ candid opinions about your business is an invaluable way to monitor your company.
When you have customers complete a formal survey, you may want to thank them with a discount card. This type of “reward” not only will encourage more people to fill out your surveys, but they will also be more likely to return to your store to make another purchase so that they can use their reward!
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