Managing retail reporting is a complex but highly rewarding process. In this article, we’ll cover some simple ways to manage retail reporting that you can start implementing for your business right away.
But before we dive into how, let’s cover why. Many retail businesses treat reporting as a secondary or even tertiary task, not a core and key part of their business. If reporting is on the backburner for your retail operation, it’s essential to reframe your perspective and consider why reporting is so critically important for retail businesses in the first place. Reporting enables your retail business to do several things better.
First, reporting empowers you to make smart, dynamic changes in response to real-time results. If you aren’t reporting constantly and dynamically, how can you effectively respond to the consistent challenges of running a retail business in a competitive industry? The answer is that it is hard, if not impossible to do so.
Second, reporting provides accountability. It’s easy for a retail team to feel like they are hitting their goals, or even to claim that they are doing so, but the reality of the situation ultimately comes through in the numbers. With a strong reporting program in place, you can stay accountable for your performance against your goals and hold your team members accountable as well.
Finally, reporting enables retail businesses to better serve their customers. By reporting on customer behavior and customer satisfaction, you can ascertain what you need to do to enhance your customer experience and service to meet the high expectation of the people you serve every day.
For these reasons and more you need to have a comprehensive retail reporting program in place. But once it’s established, how do you go about managing it?
Nailing Down the Basics
You should start with the fundamentals of managing your retail reporting functions. Come up with repeatable tasks related to the capture and reporting of data related to all key metrics of your business. When in doubt as to whether you should bother capturing a metric, err on the side of including it. It’s always better to have more data than you need than not to have enough.
Establish accountability for reporting and ensure there are no gaps in the team structure that could cause you to miss data capture or report development each month. You need to ensure that you have, at the very least, month-over-month reporting in place so you can see how you are doing and make adjustments at the start of each month. Weekly reporting is better, daily reporting is better still, and granular, real-time reporting is the ideal.
Moving to the Next Level
Once you’ve established the basics of your retail reporting efforts, it’s time to take things to the next level. That’s where FormPiper comes in.
FormPiper is a provider of comprehensive consumer finance automation solutions, and that includes cutting-edge reporting functionality. We understand the retail sphere in and out, and know firsthand how important data is to your overall success and ability to adjust to make improvements.
FormPiper delivers the key reporting info you need through a single, convenient dashboard, presenting aggregated data from your lending providers and stack ranking both locations and employees – store performance and individual performance – so you can better understand which locations and team members need a little support to better the mark.
Knowledge is power, and with FormPiper’s exceptional reporting dashboard acting as the hub of your retail business, you’ll have more power as a business owner or decision maker than ever before, and that will help you boost your revenue, drive customer satisfaction, and get ever closer to accomplishing your goals.
Schedule a demo with us today and see how FormPiper reporting can make all the difference for your retail business.
