fbpx As a small business owner, you may be starting to realize that pulling, analyzing, and using your data to make decisions about your business is becoming a necessity to be successful. But sometimes when you’re just getting started, it’s hard to know the why’s and how’s behind looking into your data. As your data partners, we want to make things easy for you. That’s why we’re going to walk you through why you need to pull your comparative weekly sales data and how to do it. WHY: When it comes to evaluating the success of your business, using your intuition to measure your store is a quick way to find your store in trouble. Looking at your comparative sales data is a necessity if you want to understand how your store is doing. If you don’t compare your weekly sales data month over month or year over year, it’s hard to know how successful you really are. And even more troublesome, you’ll never be able to profitably forecast for your store. That means you end up overbuying, underselling, and marking down a lot more inventory than you intended. Rather than trusting your gut, use this data to start measuring your store’s performance. HOW: Run a report for weekly sales year over year. This will help you see how your store performed in the same week the year before. Being able to compare the weeks, year over year, helps you understand if your sales are up or down. Once you start to identify trends in your comparative data, you’ll be able to start identifying opportunities to improve your buying and selling strategies. RICS Pro Tip! To get started with comparative weekly sales data, go to the Dashboard, select Sales, and pick Sales Summary Comparison. Select “Order by: Store” and “Period: 1 Week” and run the report to view your store’s sales performance.