Creating Actionable POS Dashboards – Retail Sales & Inventory Reporting
By Jim Lewis, CEO Improved Retail Options LLC
Individuals really like dashboards. But except it is actionable or telling them some thing they never know, they get uninteresting swift. A superior dashboard ought to deliver insights that would normally go unnoticed. An even improved dashboard is a single that provides some thing that is precisely actionable.
Especially actionable suggests it will have to guide the user to an chance or liability that can be acted on. In our planet that signifies pointing out things and outlets that are bought out, objects with as well a lot stock, a change in size or colour, and so on. It’s extra than just filtering. It have to be smart. For example, it does not require to display you products that are providing out immediately if they are marked down.
Digestion
The information and facts presented in a dashboard should reflect the reader’s part. For illustration, income executives commonly want to glance at things at a large degree with comparative info (TY v. LY, and many others.). Planners need a lot more element- one thing that prioritizes issues or opportunities and presents them answers in 1 or 2 clicks. In basic, a perfectly-manufactured dashboard should incorporate a balance of visualizations, easily digestible KPI’s and brief sights of focused data. It could possibly incorporate:
- The Point out of the small business around various time durations. The main KPI’s and comparisons.
- Visualization of inventory and revenue ratios. Must be drillable into departments, courses or whichever hierarchy is utilised.
- Interactive cards. This is the actionable region. Rank the opportunities and liabilities and have a website link to a template or data feed with calculations on it for simple implementation. For case in point, for marketed out objects, click on the product and get an allocation, pre-calculated by the procedure.

A great dashboard should be actionable.
We’ve Acquired the Power (BI)
There are many good visualization instruments on the market to develop dashboards. The essential is acquiring the expertise to know what to set in it, and how to join and extract knowledge at the many ranges essential. In quite a few scenarios we customized structure dashboards from scratch for the reason that it offers the final degree of customization. For anything at all else we use Microsoft’s Electricity BI. It’s functional and if you have a superior know-how of programming in Office environment (VBA) you will sense suitable at house.
Details
Regardless of the platform you choose, a dashboard is ineffective without having data. We combine POS product sales and stock, ideally at retail store level. For quite large facts sets, you can compact shop degree info into a summary view. You can also integrate other facts sets such as a supplier’s wholesale stock (from ERP) or tables that contains promotions or seasonality.
For additional details about how ERS can assist you visualize your company, make contact with us.