How to Create a Daily Sales Report (Tips + Template)

A daily sales report is a business intelligence tool that provides managers with relevant sales information. Need to monitor your current promotions? Or are you looking for areas where you could improve?

Daily sales reporting can help you do exactly this. For example, a daily sales report for a convenience store might highlight:

• Top selling items (identity growth day-to-day or week-to-week)
• Promotion performance (e.g., if a BOGO promo is driving sales)
• Discrepancies in reconciliation (potential theft?)
• Daily changes in sales volume

In other words, daily sales reporting with POS data helps your team stay ahead of changes, monitor progress, and adjust faster. However, many managers don’t know what sales metrics to include and how to design a transaction report that’s actionable.

Good news! This guide will walk you through the process. Keep reading to learn why you might create a daily sales report, the essential components to include, and sales report templates you can use to make your report more effective.

What Is a Daily Sales Report?

A daily sales report, or a reconciliation report, is a summary of a retail business’s sales activity for a single day. It tracks key metrics like total revenue, discounts offered, units sold, and sometimes, sales by product or employee.

Reconciliation reports aren’t just useful for accounting. They are one of the most useful forms of POS data reporting. Businesses can use these reports to:

• Monitor Performance – A daily report provides a quick snapshot of sales help. It can be used to identify trends, track targets, and course-correct strategies.
• Decision Making – Daily insights can help make decisions about staffing, promotions, inventory management, and product placement.
• Improved Efficiency – Use this report to find strengths and weakness and use these insights to optimize daily operations.

Example: Sales Reconciliation Report

A liquor store wants to increase sales. The store manager starts daily sales reporting to monitor average transaction value and product categories.

Through daily reporting, the manager notices two trends: 1) a lower-than-average transaction value, and 2) the wine category consistently performs well. Using these insights, the store could allocate more inventory to wines and offer wine bundles to increase transaction value.

Video: Daily Reconciliation Reporting in FTx POS

Within Control Center, our POS back office software, you have a variety of reconciliation reporting options. You can customize this report based on your business:

Benefits of Daily Sales Reporting

When considering a daily sales report, most businesses say, “Do I really need to report this frequently?”

The answer typically depends on sales volume. The greater the sales volume, the more beneficial a daily report will be. Ultimately, there are a ton of benefits of sales reporting every day, including:

1. Faster Intervention

Daily reports can expose sales issues like staffing shortages, product availability problems, or unexpected dips much faster. Let’s say, on Tuesday, you recognize a big dip in sales for a best-selling item.

A daily report helps you identify the root cause, e.g., a staffing shortage that led to longer waits, issues with a stockout of a popular item, or a BOGO promotion that’s not performing.

You can use this information to increase staffing or improve your BOGO marketing in-store to keep your promotion on course.

2. Find Your Winners

Let’s say you launch 3 promotions at the start of the month. You want to test which one appeals most to your customers, and then market the winner throughout the month. Daily reporting helps you quickly decipher which promotions work. This allows you to double-down on winners much faster.

For example, a convenience store uses digital signage to market all three promotions. After the store has a clear winner, they can then change its digital signs to promote only the winning promotion.

3.Better Inventory Management

Daily reports reveal what’s selling and what’s not. You can use these insights to optimize inventory levels.

For example, say a convenience store notices a seasonal shift in sales. The weather is warmer, and, as a result, ice is selling faster. The c-store could then make a reorder faster to avoid a potential stockout.

4. Quick Customer Insights

Keep tabs on customer buying patterns with daily reports. You can identify:

• Best-sellers
• Peak sales hours
• Preferred payment options

This will help you create data-driven marketing campaigns on-the-fly, optimize product placement, or even change store layout for a customer-centric experience. For instance, Daylight Savings Time tends to extend afternoon/evening sales rushes. A daily sales report would show how this trend affects the shop, and help a business optimize their staffing accordingly.

5. Multi-Location Synergy

For multi-store locations, daily sales reporting provides a more holistic view of the operation. This is useful for district managers who can identify top-performing stores, promotional activities by location, and even cashier performance by location.

These insights help the business establish cross-location promotions. For example, if a promotion underperforms at an isolated location, the manager could investigate. Is signage not working? Are cashiers not using the upselling prompts?

Essential Components of a Daily Sales Report

A helpful sales report synthesizes a variety of data, including sales metrics, comparative analysis, individual performance details, and other useful data. Here’s a look at the most critical data to include in your report:

Sales Metrics

In general, sales metrics are the most important element in a report. Sales reports typically include these metrics:

1. Total sales – The total amount of revenue generated (Example: $5240).

2. Number of transactions – The total number of cashed out transactions (Example: 275).

3. Average transaction value – Total number of sales divided by transactions. This shows average customer spending per visit (Example: $23.25).

4. Units sold – The total number of individual items sold (Example: 450 items).

5. Top selling categories – Shows which product categories had the most sales for the previous day (Example: Red wine, domestic beer).

Individual Performance Details

This section is optional, and it might make more sense for a large or multi-location store. Some potential metrics to include would be:

1. Sales by employee – Only useful for stores with multiple cashiers or if you’re using cashier upsell incentives with commissions.

2. Number of transactions per cashier – Useful for analyzing cashier efficiency.

Other Metrics to Include

Depending on your business, there are additional metrics and insights you’ll want to include. A few examples are:

1. Voided transactions – May help to pinpoint cashier theft or issues with checkouts.

2. Cash vs. Credit card – This metric reveals payment preferences and insights on cash handling.

3. Cash till report – If you’re using a weighted cash drawer, this metric would help you understand cash taken by employee.

4. Discounts offered – An insight into how many coupons and discounts there are per day.

5. Weather – A brief explanation of the weather may explain sales increases / dips.

Comparative Analysis

This section compares the daily sales metrics to a previous period. Typically, it will show sales compared to the previous day or a week-over-week comparison.

You might set a daily sales goal, as well. Add a metric that compares your total to the sales goal, e.g., +5% of daily sales target.

Choosing a Format for Your Sales Report

Daily reconciliation reporting can take many formats. Before you develop a sales report template, be aware of the various options, which include:

1. Tabular Format

This is the most common format for a sales reconciliation report. It displays information in a table with rows and columns. Pros of this type of format include user friendliness, clear organization, allows for quick comparisons, and suitable for detailed reports.

Use a tabular format to present core sales figures like total sales, units sold, and average transaction value.

2. Graphs and Charts

You can also visually display data in bar charts, line graphs, or pie charts. Note: Your report might include a mix of tabular and graphical data. For example, top-selling categories are easy to understand with a pie chart (e.g., quick service food accounted for 25% of all sales).

Pros for this format include its highly visual display, ability to simplify complex data, and helps to show outliers (especially line or bar charts). Use this format for comparisons, or when you need to show a percent of 100 in a pie chart.

3. Narrative Format

This is a story-based report that summarizes data in a written format. This typically wouldn’t be used for a daily report but may be more beneficial or a lookback report (e.g. after a sale or promotion). You might incorporate data in charts or tables but include slides that explain and summarize the data.

This is useful for summarizing findings, explaining data, and tends to be reserved for longer form reports for multiple stakeholders.

4. Dashboard Format

A dashboard automates reporting and is a single, shareable screen that displays data. Typically, it incorporates a variety of data visualizations and tables, providing a data snapshot for end-users.

Dashboards are user-friendly, and if automated, they can reduce the time needed for reporting. They’re typically great for ongoing reporting and help to quickly summarize data from various reports.

What’s Best for a Daily Sales Report?

In general, a table with key sales metrics is sufficient. This will quickly show the data and allow for fast analysis. However, you might incorporate:

• Graphs/charts for comparative analysis (week-over-week growth)
• Leave space for narrative insights (weather reporting/staff shortage explanations)
• Use a pie chart if you need to showcase a percentage of 100 (e.g., sales by category)

Setting Up a Daily Sales Report Template

Creating a template will help you standardize daily sales reporting and ensure your report serves your business.

A bad report has unclear organization, and it might include too much data. One telltale sign: A bad report doesn’t inform the end-user and the next steps will be unclear. To make an effective reporting template, follow these steps:

Step 1: Define Your Goals

Know your KPIs (key performance indicators) and how that data will influence decision making. Also, think about your end-user.

For a retail sales report, the end user will often be the manager. They might use the data to make staffing decisions, respond to inventory issues, and for accounting purposes. Knowing this, you can design a sales report template that’s aligned to these needs. You might include:

• Total sales and average orders
• Low-stock notifications
• Cashier performance
• Sales by category
• Sales by promotion

Step 2: Choose the Right Tools

You can create reports easily with these tools:

• Spreadsheets – Versatile and user-friendly, ideal for basic tabular reports. This also makes day-to-day reporting easy.
• A Retail Point-of-Sale (POS) System: Many retail POS systems offer built-in reporting functionalities for automated data collection.

For a larger business, you may move to data visualization tools, which allow you to compile data into a dashboard. Examples include Power BI and Tableau.

Step 3: Customize Your Template

Structure the data based on your goals. For example, if the goal is to increase sales, sales metrics and comparative analysis data will be prominent. You may offer insights into ongoing promotions.

If your goal is retail loss prevention, you’d likely isolate cashier performance metrics, voids, and cash sales reconciliation. Once you’ve laid out this data, you should:

• Incorporate clear labels
• Focus on readability (insights should be easy to identify from a quick scan)
• Use conditional formatting to call attention to key data points (e.g., displaying under totals in red vs green)

Step 4: Automate Data Collection

A key benefit of FTx POS is that you can automate daily reconciliation reporting. This allows you to create a report and customize the template, based on your needs. And then, each day, once a manager or cashier starts the reconciliation process the report is automatically generated.

You can then view this data within Control Center, or you can export it to your data visualization tool of choice.

Step 5: Update and Analyze

Your first version of the report may need work. Ultimately, reporting is an ongoing process. You may need to update the data you include to be more useful for the end user. A few tips for continually improving your reporting include:

• Establish a routine for daily report updates, ensuring data accuracy and timeliness.
• Analyze trends and identify areas for improvement.
• Use the report to make informed decisions regarding staffing, promotions, inventory management, and overall sales strategy.

Wrapping Up

A daily sales report in retail operations can be a powerful tool for improving and growing sales. But often, these reports fall short, because a business settles on a template that doesn’t serve their unique goals.

For best results, you have to customize your template. Only include the most vital data, and develop a template to display that data in a way that’s easy to analyze and that informs your managers on what to do next. If you can achieve that, these reports will help you identify trends faster, address problems more quickly, and ultimately generate more sales.

Interested in the reporting capabilities of FTx POS? Contact our sales team today to learn more about robust analytics and reporting tools.