7 Top Reports that helps Business Owners to take right decisions.
Many Small business owners independently manage everything from Purchase to Sales & Marketing and all in between them. Few manage their book keeping activities in these hectic activities. What is surprising they manage all of them manually and most of these financial numbers are in their “Head” and not in any documents. Based on our experience with Small Businesses and its owners, we are making a list of “7 top reports that helps Business Owners to take right decisions”.
Importance of decision making in business.
Today, data driven business decisions are making sense and it is the need of the hour. Since the businesses are mobile and need to take a quick decision, Small Business owners should move to any Cloud solutions, mobile apps, distributor management system etc. that could simplify their process and help them. ACTouch.com could help many businesses to transform to digital age with its tools.
1. Stock reports
A regular stock reports with costs, available stocks, pricing etc. This could help to reduce the product wastage by identifying where its lying and not used for how many days.
These reports are important to submit to Banks or other Financial institutions for the Loans too.
2. Sales Reports and performance
Usage of cloud technologies have made the generation of reports and access to data made it easy and simple. SMEs can generate Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly reports to track sales from anywhere.
It is important to note that Sales report is not just for checking what’s the total Invoice value and how much money we made etc, but to note which items are moving fast, who is buying them repeatedly and what percentage of discount offered to them etc. Its also important to note and track, who are the prospects asked quotations, how many converted, who didn’t and why? Did we get less conversion due to price points or delivery terms or some other problems? Business should monitor these parameters and they can arrive at a pattern and address that to win deals and closure date.
Cloud Technologies and mobile apps could help you to simplify the process and data access etc.
3. Supply and Demand patterns
It is essential to track what’s the demand and how we met the supply and is this within time limits or not? This would help you to focus more on sales and analyze the data and keep sufficient stocks and ready to dispatch at short notice. One of the major advantages of this model is, increase inventory churn and reduce overhead costs.
SME’s should study the trends of their buyer’s behaviour and to know what they bought, when and a pattern could emerge from there. Also note at what price, repeated purchase etc that’s happened.
4. Monitor your competitor and their performance.
It is always said that you should know your competitor more than he knows himself.
There are multiple ways to find the competitor annual sales, revenue etc depending on the type and nature of your business. Sometime, there are people who does research on your competitors and come with reports etc.
These data helps to analysing the trends, what products are sold, how the market are moving etc. Use some of the good BI tools to handle it.
5. Manage Supply chain and know your hurdles and costing.
Generate reports to know customer buying preference, their needs of logistics and what they prefer etc. Most of the SME’s don’t have an idea on what would be the logistic cost to supply an item to customer and how it affects their profit margins.
6. Monitor Product costing
Review the pricing trends and see what is the price point where you can maximise the profits. As a business owner, you should have the complete details of the costing and how one element can change the total dynamic of the costs.
7. Debtor and Creditor Reports
This report normally reviewed by the business owners regularly as this gives an input to their monthly cash-flow status, when to collect the money, who is good and bad creditor etc. Most of these data helps to analyse the credit terms and modify them, change the payment terms and conditions etc. Many times, its good to collect the cash upfront by giving 2% discount as the cost of the money could be more than 2% for 2 months duration.
Conclusion
In summary there could be many more reports depending on each businesses and their current strengths and weakness. Investment in latest technologies such as digital marketing, Cloud computing, Mobile Apps, Business Intelligence etc could help businesses to be ahead of their competition and improve their customer satisfaction.
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