Creating Actionable POS Dashboards – Retail Sales & Inventory Reporting

By Jim Lewis, CEO Enhanced Retail Solutions LLC

Folks like dashboards. But unless it is actionable or telling them something they don’t know, they get boring quick. A excellent dashboard ought to present insights that would if not go unnoticed. An even much better dashboard is one particular that supplies some thing that is precisely actionable.

Specifically actionable indicates it ought to guide the user to an prospect or legal responsibility that can be acted on. In our environment that implies pointing out goods and merchants that are sold out, objects with too substantially stock, a change in dimension or color, and so on. It is extra than just filtering. It will have to be intelligent. For case in point, it does not need to have to show you objects that are offering out immediately if they are marked down.

Digestion

The details introduced in a dashboard ought to mirror the reader’s part. For case in point, sales executives generally want to search at matters at a substantial degree with comparative details (TY v. LY, and many others.). Planners require additional detail- anything that prioritizes complications or prospects and offers them responses in 1 or 2 clicks. In standard, a properly-built dashboard should really contain a balance of visualizations, simply digestible KPI’s and brief views of specific details. It may possibly involve:

• The State of the business more than various time intervals. The core KPI’s and comparisons.
• Visualization of stock and gross sales ratios. Need to be drillable into departments, lessons or what ever hierarchy is utilised.
• Interactive cards. This is the actionable location. Rank the alternatives and liabilities and have a url to a template or information feed with calculations on it for easy implementation. For example, for bought out products, simply click on the merchandise and get an allocation, pre-calculated by the technique.

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There are numerous good visualization instruments on the industry to make dashboards. The essential is having the abilities to know what to place in it, and how to hook up and extract info at the several stages required. In many cases we customized design and style dashboards from scratch for the reason that it provides the ultimate degree of customization. For something else we use Microsoft’s Power BI. It is functional and if you have a superior information of programming in Business office (VBA) you’ll really feel correct at property.

Information

No matter of the system you choose, a dashboard is worthless without the need of details. We integrate POS revenue and stock, preferably at store stage. For very big information sets, you can compact retail store degree details into a summary see. You can also combine other facts sets such as a supplier’s wholesale stock (from ERP) or tables that contains promotions or seasonality.

For far more info about how ERS can aid you visualize your business, speak to us.