Utilizing Clover Reporting for sales forecasting

Clover’s reporting function provides a powerful toolset for businesses to track and analyze various aspects of their operations. It offers live and robust cloud-based reporting accessible through the user-friendly Clover Dashboard. With this feature, you can access crucial data and insights from anywhere, anytime, enabling informed decision-making on the go.

Clover Sales Overview Report – and what it shows you:

The Sales Overview rolls up your sales reports into one where you can see overall trends in such things as gross sales, net sales, average ticket size, and amount collected for a selected time period. Clover Reporting allows you to filter your data by time period, employee, order type, source of order, and by Clover device.

The summary also highlights your top revenue items, best-selling categories, and most popular individual items, allowing you to gain valuable information about your sales patterns and make informed decisions. The Sales Trends section breaks down the time period side-by-side in a numerical format. This is useful to discover your peak periods—either during the week or even over the course of a single day. It also gives you a snapshot of key numbers like average ticket size, amount collected and net sales with trends for each.

Your Sales trends overview report includes:

Top tender types, which reveals how your customers prefer to pay you.
Top categories, which reveals the types of products or specific items you sold most.
Top items sold, which reveals your best-selling products, enabling you to optimize your inventory management, marketing efforts, and overall business strategies.
Top card types, which reveals customer preferences and payment habits. This can be helpful to know as different card types may have varying processing fees and associated costs.
Top revenue classes, which reveals what kinds of products were selling and during what time period. For example, if you’re a restaurant, this shows your sales from alcohol versus food. A salon might see haircuts versus sales of products. This comprehensive tracking ensures that businesses have a clear understanding of which categories are driving revenue growth and which ones require attention or improvement.
Source of orders, which tells you through which channel your sales are arriving—in-house, to go, pick up, or online order.
Compare to prior periods, which reveals whether you gained or lost sales. Then take a look at year-over-year sales to see how a particular month compared to the same month last year.

How to use Clover Reporting to forecast your sales

Look at the data ranges for which your business had significant changes and look at all the variables the report includes. Take note of what people were buying during each period, and how they chose to make those purchases.
Review your labour costs, which are often your greatest expenses. You should monitor this relative to sales on a regular basis.
Reduce your overhead costs by forecasting your staff needs. You can do this by identifying your peak periods and how customers are preferring to purchase from you. Customer pickup, for example, often requires less staff than full-serve.

If you compare periods of time, you can see how consumer spending patterns may have changed in the last year. Did your most loyal customers start ordering online only, or do they prefer takeout? Did they continue to buy the same products, or did you have increased demand on specific products or services? Did people still try new products, or did they stick to comforting classics? Did a promotion help improve customer demand, or did it fall flat?

Item sales reporting – and what it shows you:

Items Report tells you which of your products sell the best. Top 5 Items (pictured above) shows your top sellers with a year-over-year comparison, and you can dive deeper from here.

You can apply filters to this data to determine which classes of products perform best (for example, wine versus beer), which products had the most returns, or which products sold…but at a steep discount?

How to use item reporting to forecast your sales:

This report is especially useful for tracking inventory to make sure you have enough stock of popular items and don’t have your cash tied up in products that aren’t selling.
Use this report to determine which of your products have the highest profit margin. You may sell donuts like hotcakes, but if you aren’t making enough profit on them you can run into cash flow problems.
Identify when you are selling those high-profit-margin items, and ideate on how you can sell more of them.
Looking at rows of data can be confusing—look only at the data you want by clicking on the “Display” tab and customizing your report.

Sales reporting is vital for businesses aiming to unlock valuable insights, drive growth, and make informed decisions. Clover’s powerful reporting capabilities offer businesses the tools you need to effectively track, analyze, and categorize revenue streams. Keeping pace with your numbers and sales on a daily basis is not only smart, it can also help you pivot accordingly. Clover Reporting is an extremely powerful tool to help you do just that while managing your cash flow.

Want to learn more about Clover Reporting?

The Clover Help Center provides a wealth of information, step-by-step guides, and troubleshooting tips to assist users in understanding Clover’s features and services.

To learn how a Clover POS system enabled with powerful tracking and reporting can help your business, reach out to a Clover Business Consultant today.