Recording your sales consistently is a good habit and an essential one in business, because that data shows you the shape of your business, lets you work out profit and loss, and — kept in enough detail — allows you to plan ahead.
Poor or low-quality sales records, on the other hand, actively damage a business. They can lead you to plan on the wrong basis, cost things incorrectly, get stock wrong, or run up hidden costs you never saw coming. Which is why checking your sales records for bad data matters.
So what does bad data look like?
1. Incorrect data
A product name typed wrongly, or the wrong product code entered. When the figures are totted up or a report is run, the result is an error or a number that does not match reality.
2. Incomplete data
Product details entered only in part — no product category, say, or, for items that come in variants, no colour, size or dimensions recorded. What goes into the system is then less than accurate.
3. Duplicated data
Entering the same information twice, or recording a sale twice, inflates your sales figures above what you actually took.
4. Disorganised data
Recording data in no consistent order and with no system risks losing it or getting it wrong, and leaves you unable to analyse or calculate anything from it.
What poor sales records cost you
Poor sales records do real damage to a business. Beyond the frustration of working with the data, they can cause any number of knock-on problems. Here are the ones that tend to follow.
Decisions made on the wrong basis
Incorrect data leads to incorrect decisions. You may build the wrong promotion, develop the wrong kind of product, or run a campaign your customers were never interested in.
Problems managing stock
Poor sales data leads to problems such as running short of your best sellers (and losing the sales that go with them) or over-ordering slow movers and tying up capital in them.
Poor resource allocation and sales forecasting
If the data going into your sales reports is poor, you will allocate what you have — staff, ingredients, people on shift — in the wrong places. Imagine your records say 8am is a quiet trading period, so you cut resources then, when the true figure was 8pm.
Higher operating costs
At some point you will have to spend the time and the labour to put the data right. Recording it correctly from the start is far better value.
Damage to your brand's reputation
Repeated mistakes, and slow service caused by decisions made on the wrong basis and resources in the wrong places, gradually erode your customers' trust. Staff who run into these problems again and again also lose the motivation to do the job well.
Missed opportunities
When the data you hold cannot tell you about a new trend or what customers want, you miss chances to grow the business and risk being overtaken by the competition.
Keep your sales reports right with Qashier POS
Qashier POS is a genuinely capable partner for running your shop. It keeps the business running smoothly and, with its features doing the work, it removes the sales-recording problems before they start.
Incorrect data, mistakes in the records? They simply do not happen, because as soon as a sale is made the Qashier POS system records it accurately in the system straight away. Being digital, it is far easier to check, and because the POS logs every single sale automatically, nothing goes missing from your takings.
Qashier POS also connects to the cloud. With an internet connection, your sales data is stored online, kept safe, and accessible from anywhere through the QashierHQ back office.
QashierHQ lets you follow all of your sales data in real time, pull up deeper insight, and compare figures day by day, week by week and month by month. You can also go further and analyse which products or services are selling well and which are not, so you can plan ahead.
Better still, Qashier POS can record what each individual customer buys, through memberships and points. Members collect points to spend as discounts or on special privileges, which gives you access to their purchase history and lets you put that data to far better use. And Qashier makes customers rather more willing to join, because we have Qashier Treats, a new kind of loyalty programme built around scan-to-collect points
As we said at the outset, recording sales accurately means you miss no opportunities, lose no money and run up no hidden costs. It is also the bridge that carries your business towards success.
Bringing in a partner like Qashier POS to help run your shop is the right call. Beyond ringing up sales and recording them, it comes with a great many useful features that make running the shop smoother and easier.