8 Aug 2025 · 6 min
Ashley Alderson walks through where to find eight essential retail metrics in your POS and accounting systems: inventory at cost and retail, operating expenses, markdown percentage, transaction and visitor counts, and sales figures. She includes Shopify-specific tips and suggests a traffic counter for physical stores.
Being a retailer ain't easy. That's why we at the Boutique Hub are going to be coming to you with a new series called Know youw Numbers. We're going to get the facts on what is the most important to drive profit, drive cash in your business and really have you feel in control over your future. Numbers are black and white. It's the one thing we record every day. And we're going to teach you how to make the most of tracking your KPIs and metrics. Let's jump in. Okay, so as we're going into this, knowing your number series, I wanted to start us out with a little ground rules. Right? So we're going to be looking at some formulas and I'm going to be asking you to know some metrics to calculate those formulas. So I thought it would be helpful to let you know where you can find them. Now, everyone has a different pos, so we can't go over each POS individually. But hopefully this will point you in the right direction. So let's start with on hand inventory at cost and on hand inventory at retail. Now this should be in your POS under the report section that have to do with inventory. Usually each POS has an inventory report section. It should show your on hand inventory at cost and at retail. Now what you'll mostly likely see it as is your month end inventory. So let's say we're in the middle of May. If you wanted to see your current on hand, you're probably going to be looking at the inventory from the end of April. That's how it's tabulated. So in Shopify, for instance, you'll see a month end inventory snapshot, a month end inventory value report. And you'll also pro tip have an ABC product analysis report which will have both your inventory at cost and your inventory at retail right on the first line of the summary. Okay, so that's how we're going to find those numbers. Your operating expenses, your percentage of operating expenses as compared to sales. Well, that's going to come from your P and L. So look at your last P and L that your bookkeeper or accountant put together. You should see what were your sales for the year, what were the operating expenses for the year. And then we're going to want to find that percentage your operating expenses were in comparison to your sales. Okay. So that's going to be a great way to see how much margin is going to cover your operating expenses and benchmark those too. Okay. Markdown percentage. Now this is a little trickier on most point of sale systems you're going to want to look for a sales by discount report. Now that is on shopify. How you find it, your sales by discount. And then again to find out your markdown percentage, you're going to look at your total sales in comparisons to your discounted sales and what percentage will were discounted. That is how you will find your markdown percentage. Okay, your number of transactions. Your number of transactions, well that should be in any daily sales report. So any sales report you pull should easily have your number of transactions right there. Daily number of visitors. Well, there's two things we need to look out for here. If you are an E commerce or online store, you use Google Analytics. It will easily tell you how many people visited your site that day. If you are a brick and mortar store, I strongly, strongly suggest you go out get a traffic counter. It doesn't need to be expensive, it doesn't need to be fancy. It just needs to track the amount of people that walked in your door and you need to keep track of it every day. So that's how we're going to find our daily number of visitors. Your total sales by dollar. Your total sales by units. Well again that should be right there on your sales report. It's going to look a little different for each pos, but I would say a vast majority would a hundred percent, certainly dollars. And you're going to see the units and again you're going to see those number of transactions. So if you have any difficulty there, let us know. But it should be right there for you. And then finally your average inventory at retail. Well to find this we have two options. So your average inventory at retail is going to be your month end inventory for January and your month end inventory for December. In the same year you're going to add them together and divide them by two. And what that should tell you is approximately what was the average amount of inventory you held throughout the year. So it's going to show you kind of your peak and your lowest. We're going to get the average and that's going to show you about where you stayed in terms of inventory level throughout the year. Now if you can't find that, I would suggest for the sake of the formulas we're going to show just use on hand inventory at retail which could be found in the month end inventory snapshot or the month end inventory value report. So that is my tips for finding these metrics. And this way when we start talking about formulas, you know exactly where to look. Hope that helps. We'll see you in the Knowing your numbers series.
That's it for five Minute Friday, you guys. I hope you found some quick, actionable steps you can put into play in your business right away. As always, if you're not yet a member of the Boutique Hub, I would love to personally invite you to join us. It's where all of the daily conversations happen. The up to date what is working now in the industry conversations, the latest trainings, trend reports, discounts, resources, and of course access to to thousands of wholesale brands that you also know and love. So please take a minute, follow the link in the show notes and we would love to invite you to join us inside of the Boutique Hub.
