The Small Business Guide To POS Reporting

As an owner of a business, you know how important sales are, so any POS system should come standard with detailed sales reports.

These reports will help you understand your profits, peak times, and where you could be losing money. Here are some key metrics your POS sales report should track:

• Best/worst-selling items
• Sales activity by day/date range
• Sales by employee/product/department
• Sales by menu item
• Most commonly returned items
• Gross profits for week, month, year, etc.
• Online and/or mobile sales

Toast POS menu report

While sales are important, the actual payments determine your profit at the end of the day.

Payment reports help you keep track of cash flow, credit card payments, and inefficiencies that can impact your business.

These reports can help you prevent employee theft and errors, determine how your customers prefer to pay, and figure out how many sales are discounted or sold at full price. Here are some things you should be able to track in your POS payment reports:

• Cash events
• Taxes paid
• Tips and gratuities
• Voided sales
• Refunds
• Discounts
• Payments by payment method (credit card, gift card, check, mobile, etc.)
• Employee payouts (if, for example, waitstaff takes payouts at the end of every shift)

Clover payment report

They say your business is only as good as the people who work for you, and we couldn’t agree more.

That said, it can be difficult to determine an employee’s precise value to your business and the areas in which they need further training. Instead of hovering over your employees’ shoulders at all times (which we don’t recommend), you can use POS employee reports to keep track of your employees and monitor their sales.

While not all POS systems will offer employee management tools, they usually have integrations with apps or software that offer these features. Here are some important employee reports you should look for in a POS system:

• Employee time clock/hours worked
• Shift reports
• Employee till counts
• Employee sales report
• Employee commission report
• Employee profitability report
• Employee scheduling and payroll

Revel Systems employee profitability report

Inventory management software, often included or integrated with POS systems, allows you to keep stock and sales volume equal.

As a business owner, it’s crucial that you can generate reports showing your inventory quantities, values, and which items or ingredients you’re running low on. Here are some good POS inventory reports to look out for:

• Inventory reorder report
• Inventory value report
• Raw ingredient report (for restaurants)
• Real-time inventory tracking report

Lightspeed Retail Inventory Summary Report

POS customer management features can allow you to track repeat customers, generate targeted marketing campaigns, and create a custom loyalty program using data captured at the time of sale.

If you want more in-depth insights into your customers and marketing reports, you’ll need to use a separate CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software. Most POS systems integrate with some kind of CRM software or allow you to access the API to build a custom integration.

Here are some standard customer reports your POS should be able to provide even without a CRM integration:

• Total sales by customer
• Top customers
• Purchase and return histories per customer
• Sortable database of customer profiles (with name, email address, purchase history, account balances, etc.)

Shopify POS sales by customer report