Data is what keeps a retail business moving forward. But for too long, teams have been forced to view it through a fragmented lens, juggling between online dashboards and physical registers.
When legacy systems treat point-of-sale (POS) reports as a mere snapshot of the past, you miss the bigger picture. True retail business intelligence comes from a unified system.
Whether it’s a customer browsing online before buying in-store or a random change in SKU velocity across locations, POS reports help you uncover trends so you can act on them fast.
Ahead, you’ll learn about the top reports for your store and how to use them strategically.
A point-of-sale report is a summary your POS system generates to show what sold and how much money was collected over a period of time. You can also review sales activity for a specific retail location, register, or staff member.
For a retail owner, POS reports help you keep a finger on the pulse of your business:
For example, Shopify POS can generate sales reports that help retail teams see sales performance across their store and spot trends over time. You can use these reports to confirm sales activity and support day-to-day decisions like staffing, merchandising, and cash handling.
POS reports will vary by platform, but in general, they include the following information:
You can do deep POS data analysis with platforms like Shopify. While you can break down this data with different filters and timeframes, you don’t have to look at everything at once.
Start by focusing on these four reports to get a clear picture of your store’s health:
Retail sales reports are your moment of truth at the end of your day. They tell you what happened versus what you thought happened. With Shopify, there are a few ways to view sales trends:
Once you have this information, you can make changes to your retail operations to sell even more. For example, you can:
Inventory is basically cash sitting on your shelves. These inventory management point-of-sale reports help you ensure that cash stays liquid and doesn’t just collect dust.
Shopify shows you a handful of inventory reports to make smarter purchasing decisions, like:
It’s cheaper to keep an existing customer than to find a new one. Customer reports show if you’re building a loyal following or if your store has a revolving door problem.
There are a few key reports in your Shopify admin to get a better hold on customer retention:
For fashion retailer EVEREVE, unified customer data changed the game for its more than 2,500 stylists. Before Shopify, online and in-store histories were separate, meaning a stylist in-store couldn’t see what a customer bought online.
By unifying their data, they gave their team a complete view of every customer’s journey.
“You now have the confidence that you have a full view of their purchase history, not that their online purchases are in one account … and their in-store purchases are in a different one,” says Tamer Selim, chief technology officer (CTO) of EVEREVE.
Finance reports tell you what’s happening in your bank account. These reports are especially helpful because they show if you’re actually making money on your products. Some reports you’ll find in Shopify include:
If you’re using Shopify POS, you can access your reports in two places: the Shopify admin and your Shopify POS. The Shopify admin will give you a full report library, while the Shopify POS analytics will give you quick at-a-glance analytics.
In Shopify POS, tap ≡, then Analytics to open the Daily Sales report view.
Here you can find insights about your net sales, average order value, and average items per order. You can also compare daily sales to the sales that were made the week before.
When ecommerce and in-store data live in separate systems, reporting can get confusing. There will always be two versions of a reality: online revenue, refunds, and customer history live in one data set, store transactions and returns in another.
The result is only a partial snapshot of what’s happening in your business. Teams spend too much time reconciling numbers, and leadership makes decisions based on incomplete views of sales performance across channels.
Unified commerce solves that by routing all transactions from retail, ecommerce, social, and marketplace into the operational core. That way, product, order, and customer data all flow into one single source of truth. These modern POS systems have advantages over legacy systems in terms of reporting and data accessibility.
David’s Bridal, a 75-year-old legacy retailer, faced a common problem: aging, fragmented technology that made it impossible to act on data. In just nine months, they were able to accomplish a total digital transformation by moving to a unified Shopify foundation.
One out of every three brides in the US wears a gown from the retailer. With one single source of truth for online and in-store data, their team can now see exactly how each one of them interacts with the brand. “We already have better analytics—those brilliant basics that tell us what’s selling, what’s not selling, and getting really deep into the unified customer profiles are really critical to our business,” says Elina Vilk, president and chief business officer (CBO) of David’s Bridal.
With a commerce platform like Shopify, your ecommerce and POS run on the same infrastructure, so reporting is built on one shared dataset. Everything is updated and real time, so you never go out of stock or miss the chance to connect with a VIP customer.
POS reports are most useful when they become part of your routine. Analyzing them helps you stay ahead of the curve instead of waiting to react until something feels off. The best way to use POS reports for growth is to follow these routines:.
Before you lock up for the day, use your reports to make sure everything from the shift is accounted for. This can be done by you personally, or by a store manager.
Pull your daily totals to verify sales, taxes, and refunds. Make sure all transactions are fully processed/settled first, as some systems take a few minutes to sync the latest data.
If you accept cash, this is where you should compare expected versus counted. Record your starting float, track cash flow moving in and out, and identify discrepancies immediately so you aren’t hunting for missing bills a week later.
Once a week, step back from the daily grind and sales totals to look at the why behind your retail metrics:
Don’t wait until the end of a sale or promotion to see if it worked. CALPAK uses real-time metrics to bridge the gap between their corporate and retail teams. They closely watch store performance as events and promotions are running to ensure every touchpoint is converting.
In fact, CALPAK found that their in-store conversion rate was nine times higher than online, proving that their retail location was a major conversion engine.
“We know exactly what’s happening at the retail store. When we launch an event or a promo, we can watch the store performance in real time. It’s really exciting to have that visibility,” says Elaine Lee, executive director of DTC at CALPAK.
At the end of the month, your POS reports are your best friend for accounting and high-level strategy. Compare your POS totals against what actually hit your bank account. Keep in mind that sales views and settlement views can differ slightly due to processing times.
Use the export function to send a clean summary to your accountant or partners (it’s much easier than handing over a stack of paper receipts). Before you close your monthly books, do one final refresh to ensure every last transaction is accounted for.
The four main POS report types for most retailers are:
POS systems generally fall into three categories:
A POS is the system that allows customers to pay for products and allows you to manage daily store operations. It tracks your sales, inventory, and customer data in one place.
Imagine a boutique owner ringing up a customer on their iPad with Shopify POS. They scan a dress, tap the screen to add a loyalty discount, and the customer pays with a quick tap of their phone. As the receipt prints, the POS tells the online store that the dress is sold out, keeping everything in sync automatically.
