When you buy through affiliate links in our content, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Learn 
Managing a store involves many moving parts: monitoring sales, tracking inventory, overseeing staff performance, ensuring customer satisfaction, and much more. Juggling these tasks and making the right decisions for your store can feel impossible, even if you’re a seasoned professional.
Point of sale reports can be automatically generated from your store’s POS system, and they can make your store operations much easier by providing an organized look at your store’s sales data with exceptional levels of detail.
In this article, we’ll go over what a point of sale report is, why it’s important, and how you can use it to steer your business to greater success.
Short on Time? Here Are the Key Takeaways
- Point of sale report: A point of sale report is a customizable financial summary that details key store data like transaction amounts and payment methods over a designated timeframe.
- Importance of POS reports: Point of sale reports are important because they provide a granular, detailed look into the sales data of individual stores, in contrast to the more high-level approach of traditional documents like the income statement.
- Internal benefits: POS reports can benefit your business internally through intelligent inventory management, detailed employee performance monitoring, and increased financial accuracy.
- External benefits: You can increase customer satisfaction by using POS reports to make strategic staffing decisions and adapt to customer preferences.
What Is a Point of Sale Report?
A point of sale report is a summary report generated by a POS system, detailing items like total quantity and amount of transactions, payment methods (card or cash), items sold, timeframes, and employee ID.
Point of sale reports usually take the form of a spreadsheet or PDF document and are often highly customizable. Depending on the capabilities of your POS system, you can generate a very detailed POS report that shows every piece of data recorded or keep it broader and only display the highlights.
Plus, you can usually tailor your POS report to show data over different periods, such as daily, weekly, or monthly.
Common Items on a Point of Sale Report
| Date and time | Records when each transaction occurs |
|---|---|
| Transaction ID | Unique number identifier for each transaction |
| Employee ID | Shows which employee handled the transaction |
| Item description | Details of the product or service sold |
| Quantity sold | Number of units sold for each transaction and in total |
| Unit price | Price for each individual unit sold |
| Total sale | Total amount received from each transaction or customer |
| Payment method | How the payment was made (cash, credit card, Apple Pay, or other) |
| Discounts applied | The percentage and dollar amount of any discounts given during the transaction |
| Customer information | Optional—can include customer ID or contact details for large transactions |
| Refunds and returns | Details of any items returned or refunded |
| Net sales | Total sales minus returns and discounts |
Why Is a Point of Sale Report So Important?
Point of sale reports are important because they’re often the first look managers get at the sales performances of each store location.
It’s not just a matter of profit and loss, either. Though POS reports can be used to help compile monthly or yearly income statements, they also display many store-specific items like employee ID numbers and payment methods, which are never shown on documents like the income statement.
These small differences in details can be quite crucial when it comes to strategic decision-making and overall company success. Here’s an example:
You run a bar and grill, and while reviewing your monthly POS report, you notice through the “Employee ID” line item that one bartender, Mark, consistently has higher sales during his shifts than his peers. Looking at the “Item description” line, you see that he consistently upsells customers to premium drinks.?
You decide to have him lead a training session to teach your other employees his sales techniques. Over the next few months, this leads to a 5% increase in overall sales.
Real-world examples like this fictional one abound in the business world. Whether you’re reviewing larger trends over a longer timeframe or detailed items like employee ID and discounts applied over a single day, a POS report can help guide your decisions and steer your business toward greater profitability.
Internal Benefits of Point of Sale Reports
Let’s get a little more specific. Here are some practical ways a POS report can make your life easier as a business owner or manager.
- Inventory management: A POS report can automatically track sales velocity and inventory levels. This allows you to restock inventory only when necessary, eliminating excess costs. This is especially important for restaurants, where too much inventory can result in expired food and wasted money.
- Employee performance: A POS report can monitor the sales performance of individual employees. As we saw in the example earlier, this allows you to identify top performers—and underperformers—making promoting and firing much more straightforward.
- Financial accuracy: Because POS reports are generated directly by your POS system, they provide flawless sales and transaction data, except where errors are made by employees using the system. This financial information can flow upwards into your higher-level reports (like the income statement) for accurate reporting and audit preparation.
- Strategic sales initiatives: You can use the sales data from your POS reports to get a feel for customer preferences and trends. If one item is more popular than others, you can adjust that product’s placement inside your store to capitalize on demand. On the flip side, you can offer pricing discounts on items that aren’t selling well.
External Benefits of Point of Sale Reports
With enough time, the direct internal benefits of POS reports flow outward, enhancing your relationships with external parties.
- Customer satisfaction: A POS report can identify your best employees, expose underperformers, and help reduce wait times through effective inventory management—all of which contribute to happier customers.
- Market adaptability: When analyzed correctly, a POS report can tell you the story of your customer base’s preferences. Businesses that regularly generate and monitor POS reports can adapt to new market changes faster than those that don’t.
Discover the Best Point of Sale Report System for You
A point of sale report is a customizable summary report generated by a POS system, detailing crucial sales data like transactions, items sold, payment methods, and employee performance.
These reports are essential for business owners and managers, providing more detailed early insights into store performance than what you’d get from a traditional financial document like the income statement.
Among other things, POS reports help to drive overall store profitability by providing a roadmap for strategic decision-making, inventory management, employee assessment, product placement optimization, and more.
To generate a POS report, you’ll need a POS system. To learn more, check out our guide to the best POS systems.
