Documentation

Sales Year Over Year

This report lets you see how your sales are trending, by month, compared to previous years. See which months bring in more revenue than others, and plan your budgeting and staffing appropriately. Identify any negative sales trends developing while you still have time to adjust and correct.

  • Role

    Store Owner

  • Job

    Planning: Promotional, Staffing, Inventory

  • Recommended Use

    Monthly

Benefits to You:

Set goals and spot emerging sales trends while you still have time to adjust for them.
  • Set revenue targets based on the month’s average total, giving yourself more reasonable and dynamic goals to hit.
  • Identify emerging negative trends and adjust your promotional efforts, merchandising, and staffing to correct before it is too late.
  • Identify emerging growth trends while there is still time to maximize them through additional purchasing or staffing.
Proactively create long-term strategies for promotion and purchases.
  • Spot the months when your business starts to slow down and plan promotions accordingly. Schedule special events to bring different customers in during these slow periods.
  • Alternately, understand the months when you can do store cleanings or overhauls, as they are generally slow periods anyway.
Vacation with confidence.
  • Take time off when you know the store will be slower, and can be less staffed. Make this decision with the confidence of years of data.

How it's calculated:

  • The important dimensions for this report are Month and Year.
  • The report is pivoted on the Year dimension.
  • It is filtered by Completed Year for the last 3 years.

In this way you see the sales grouped by Month across the last 3 years.

Available Variations:

By Day of Week
  • A chart showing what percentage of sales occurred on each day of the week, year over year, to help you see which days are the busiest in your store.
Sales by Top Category
  • The default report grouped by top level category instead of by month, so you can see which segments of your inventory bring in the most sales, and whether that's changed over time.
By Top Category, Stacked
  • A graph showing the sales of each top category month by month, so you can see whether which categories get more popular at different times of the year, and to what degree.
By Vendor
  • The default report grouped by vendor instead of by month, so you can see the popularity of each of your vendors and whether that's changed over time.
By Manufacturer
  • The default report grouped by manufacturer instead of by month, so you can see the popularity of each of your manufacturers and whether that's changed over time.
By Shop
  • For multi-store retailers, see how much each of your shops added to your overall revenue, and how that's changed over time.

Next Steps:

  • Revise a staffing plan based on how your current sales data compares to previous years
  • Develop, or adjust, your buying plan based on current versus historical sales trends of the last 3 years.
  • Plan a promotional plan for your slower months, or to adjust for downward trends. The targeted marketing reports work great for this.