Tracking sales and managing inventory efficiently is crucial to your store’s success. But with ringing registers, assisting customers, and restocking shelves, staying on top of the numbers can be tough. That's where targeted point of sale (POS) reports come in handy.
These specialized reports boil down transaction data into digestible insights. Want to know your top-selling products last month? Best times of day for sales? Most frequent customers? POS data and reports reveal all that and more with just a few clicks. However, setting up these reports can feel overwhelming.
Let this post be your POS report template. We’ll talk through the top reports you need for your liquor store, then cover the steps you can take to build out a POS report that gets you the insights you need.
Running a liquor store means keeping track of a ton of moving parts. Your inventory always fluctuates as customers snap up the latest craft releases or seasons shift and make customers crave margaritas instead of warming bourbons.
Your staffing needs change day to day based on sales volumes and seasons. And you need to keep an eagle eye on profits to stay successful. That's why a solid point of sale reporting strategy is crucial.
Related Read: 7 Crucial POS System Features Every Liquor Store Needs
POS reports give you insight into the heart of your business. Some of the most critical reports liquor stores need include:
With data like this, you can clearly spot sales trends, prevent out-of-stocks, match labor to traffic, and course correct your financials as needed. Plus, you can use the reports to inform merchandising, inventory planning, staff training, and loss prevention programs.
The key is setting up a POS report template tailored to your store. Then, you can tweak the reporting as your business grows. Most modern POS systems simplify extracting the data you need with just a few clicks. If you invest some time on the front end, POS reporting can help you drive smart business decisions year-round.
The first step you must take when creating a POS report for your liquor store is to define your objectives: Why are you running this report? What insights do you hope to gain from this report?
Determine the goals of your report. A few goals you might need to accomplish through POS reporting include analyzing sales performance, monitoring inventory levels, or monitoring customer behavior.
Next, you will need to set your parameters. Set parameters for:
You should also determine the segmentation criteria you want to build into your report. Some segmentation criteria you might consider include store location, product type, or customer demographics.
Related Read: Wine Inventory Spreadsheet: Key Liquor Store Metrics To Track
The next step you need to take when building your POS report template is to decide how you will extract and organize your data from your point of sale solution.
Most modern systems allow you to easily export sales data, inventory figures, and employee performance metrics into formats like CSV spreadsheets or Excel files. Build your report in a manner that allows you to arrange this extracted data by date range, product categories, register location — whatever parameters make sense for your reporting needs.
For example, you may want to organize sales data by week to spot trends over time or group products such as wine, beer, and liquor to compare category performance.
You’ll also want to set up your report to calculate totals, averages, percentages, and other math to spotlight trends. Useful calculations include total units sold to determine bestselling products, average sales per transaction to gauge order values, and sales as a percentage of inventory to track turnover.
Taking this upfront step to neatly compile and summarize your POS data sets the stage for illuminating analysis down the line. The cleaner and more organized the data, the easier it is to spot the insights you need to boost your store’s performance.
Getting the numbers is one thing, but staring at rows of numbers can make understanding and interpreting the data challenging.
Charts and graphs make your POS data reports easier to digest. Once you have exported your desired data from your point of sale system, use tools or prebuilt point of sale reports to visualize it through graphs and charts. You can examine bar graphs comparing sales by product type, pie charts showing category contribution percentages, or line charts demonstrating trends over time.
Next, include some narrative and context alongside each visual to highlight the data's meaning.
Related Read: SKU vs. UPC: 6 Similarities and Differences for Liquor Inventory Labeling
For example, if you notice craft beer sales have spiked 30 percent over the summer months, don’t expect that number to stand on its own. Instead, add a note to expand your craft inventory selection before next summer. Or if wines over $50 show more significant profit margins, you’d call that out as justification for more premium wine shelf space.
Putting POS data into a visual context makes the numbers more intuitive for strategic decision-making. Well-designed charts allow you to better see opportunities and challenges, giving you the insights you need to make the necessary changes to your processes and inventory.
If you want your POS reports to be useful, you need to be able to depend on the data and insights to be accurate. Additionally, you need to be sure the reports you’ve created get at the heart of the data you and your partners need to improve your store’s operations.
Check in with other stakeholders to ensure the reporting approach meets their needs. For example, confirm with inventory managers that stock-to-sales ratios help inform reorder decisions, or have floor managers verify that sales per employee metrics reflect real-world performance.
Related Read: 5 Steps to Making an Effective Daily Sales Report
As your business evolves, you’ll want to continue refining the reports with additional data fields, visuals, or analysis. Maybe you incorporate customer demographics from loyalty programs or compare promotional campaign ROI on a new report dashboard. Maintaining reports as “living documents” that flex with your changing needs ensures they remain valuable decision-making tools rather than static files.
The end goal of creating a POS report template and running POS reports is action. Once you spot trends, anomalies, or opportunities in the data, put those insights to work through concrete next steps. Maybe you adjust staffing schedules to align with peak traffic times shown in sales reports or shift marketing dollars toward categories that data shows rising in popularity.
Use inventory, sales, and margin data together to determine which products warrant promotional pricing or in-store merchandising support. Let data-driven decisions carry through to store strategy as well. The more insights you pull from accurate POS reporting, the more your reports can fuel your liquor store’s continued success.
Following the steps in this post should help you create a POS report template you can use to create reports from your point of sale data. However, creating templates and custom-built reports can be stressful and time-consuming, even for the data-savviest of store owners.
Instead, explore a point of sale system with prebuilt reports, giving you the data you need without the hassle of building custom reports. Bottle POS offers advanced reporting with over 55 built-in reports you can use to access the data you need without stress.
Schedule a demo of Bottle POS today to see how our baked-in reporting features can help you level up your liquor store operations.