Business owners track countless metrics, but few are as crucial as sales performance. Sales reporting transforms raw sales data into actionable insights that help you understand what’s working, identify growth opportunities, and make informed decisions about your business’s future.
Sales reporting doesn’t have to be complicated. With the right approach and templates, you can create comprehensive reports that reveal trends, highlight successes, and pinpoint areas for improvement—all while saving time and maximizing the benefits to your business.
A sales report (also known as a sales analysis report) is an overview of a company’s sales activities or outcomes over a period of time. You can use sales reports to establish performance benchmarks, identify trends, and monitor progress across revenue-driving activities. Sales reports can also reveal the internal and external factors affecting sales performance, helping you anticipate future sales and make more informed business decisions.
Sales reporting processes vary by company. Businesses with internal sales teams typically have sales managers, or designated sales reps, prepare comprehensive reports and deliver them to leadership on a regular schedule. If you don’t have an internal sales department, you can prepare reports yourself. Many small business owners run their own sales reports, focusing on a few key performance metrics and using sales report templates and reporting automations to save time. Whether you’re selling a service or a product, sales reports are a key part of staying on track with your sales goals.
Sales generates extensive data across multiple business areas, creating numerous analysis opportunities. You can focus your reports on performance, employees, or processes, with each category containing multiple report types. Here’s an overview of popular options by analytical focus:
Sales performance reports analyze the outcome of sales activities, collecting data like the total number of products sold or the total profit earned. You can use performance reports to set benchmarks, monitor progress, and evaluate the effectiveness of your sales strategies. Performance reports are broadly useful and can provide value to any business that sells products or services.
Key metrics
Common types
Annual, quarterly, and monthly sales reports often include performance data. While it’s also possible to run daily or weekly reports on sales performance, many business owners find that these intervals are too short to provide meaningful information.
Sales activities reports focus on the steps your sales team has taken to win new customers during a particular time period. You can use these reports to evaluate individual sales representatives or entire sales teams. They can provide value to any business with an internal sales team, and they’re particularly popular with B2B businesses, many of which generate a significant portion of revenue through active selling.
Key metrics
Common types
Some business owners run weekly or daily sales reports that provide a granular picture of day-to-day sales rep activities. You can also use longer reporting intervals for an overview of team performance.
These reports examine the current state of your sales pipeline, helping you identify strengths and weaknesses in your sales process and facilitating more accurate sales forecasting. They can benefit ecommerce businesses with lead information, including those with robust lead-scoring systems and those with more rudimentary funnel data, such as access to information about customer behavior.
Key metrics
Common types
Like activities reports, pipeline reports can provide valuable insights over short reporting intervals. Including pipeline data in daily or weekly sales reports shows you how many deals are in your sales pipeline, how close your team is to closing them, and how efficiently they move through different funnel stages. All of this can help you predict future sales and spot weaknesses in your processes.
Follow these guidelines to create effective sales reports:
There are no universal rules about which reports to prepare, when to run them, or what data to include. The best sales report is one that helps you meet your specific goals, so start by asking yourself what you’re hoping to learn from (or do with) your report. The answer to this question is your reporting purpose.
Select a sales report type that suits your purpose. You might choose an activities report to design a development plan for your sales representatives, or a process report to predict next month’s revenues. Reports are also highly flexible. You can mix and match metrics to create a custom report type around the data you need.
This guide focuses on sales performance reports, which can provide value to any type of business. Common goals include measuring the effectiveness of your overall sales strategy, setting performance targets, and monitoring progress. Some small business owners also share performance reports with third parties, like sales consultants or potential investors, to demonstrate growth potential or request strategic guidance.
Choose your reporting period, considering your available resources and reporting goals. Small business owners typically track performance-related sales on a monthly, quarterly, or yearly basis, since daily or weekly data often lack the volume needed to reveal meaningful trends. Here’s an overview of different time interval reports:
Consider your sales cycle length as well. Generally speaking, the more time it takes you to close deals, the longer your reporting period will be. Although businesses generally reserve daily or weekly sales reports for activities-related tasks (such as evaluating sales reps or sales team performance), a company with a very short sales cycle might use weekly or daily reports to understand how experimenting with sales and marketing tactics affects short-term results.
Sales report templates help businesses and sales teams save time by eliminating the need to develop a structure from scratch. Consistent formatting facilitates comparison with previous periods, and some sales report templates automatically generate engaging visuals that highlight key information for readers and make detailed reports easier to digest.
Look for a sales report template that’s geared toward your report type, tracks metrics relevant to your goal, and meets your design or formatting needs. If you’re preparing a performance report for a potential investor, for example, you might prioritize reporting templates with built-in data visualization and sleek design.
Shopify automatically generates ecommerce and POS retail sales reports and supports extensive customization options from the Shopify dashboard.
Use your sales report template to decide which metrics to include in your report, and collect sales data from your customer relationship management (CRM) software. Sales performance-focused report templates often include the following:
Many reporting templates are customizable, so you can modify metrics tracked based on your specific goal or combine elements from multiple templates into one deliverable.
Shopify customers can automatically run ecommerce and POS retail sales reports from the Shopify admin dashboard. Shopify’s automatic sales reporting features include total sales over time, total sales by product, product variant, vendor, billing location, currency, or referrer. The platform can also track sales by sales channel, discount, and individual customer, and calculate average order value over time.
Sales performance reports help you evaluate whether your sales strategies are serving your sales objectives. They also help you spot trends, identify opportunities, and monitor progress. Here’s what to look for in performance-focused sales data:
Here’s how to write a sales report (or sales analysis report):
1. Identify your purpose.
2. Choose a report type.
3. Select a reporting period.
4. Choose a sales report template.
5. Collect sales data and assemble your report.
A sales summary (also known as a sales report or sales analysis report) is a collection of data that reflects a business’s sales performance or sales activities over a specific period of time. You can use them to track outcomes, improve processes, or evaluate sales teams. Shopify’s sales report template is one example of a sales summary focused on outcomes.
A sales report checklist is a list of steps you can follow to prepare a sales report.
