What Should Be On a Retail Industry Dashboard?

Retail industry dashboards are used to monitor inventory, margins, supply chain costs, customer satisfaction scores, and much more. One of the most impressive features of a dashboard is that it typically helps businesses see a 6% revenue increase within three months!

The metrics that should be on a retail industry dashboard vary depending on the type of retailer you are running, but some vital metrics should be included in every dashboard. On this page, we will help you get started by providing you with metrics that are consistently tracked.

Inventory Information

You should always be on top of your inventory levels and use that information to decide what products to put on your shelves. Monitor how much product you have in stock, what is being bought the quickest, what you might need to stock up on, and so on. Executives can end up saving 20 days each year with the help of a dashboard.

Pricing Information

It’s essential to monitor your prices constantly, especially for competing products that you may sell. It would also help to look at how you are doing compared to last year with the same products to make adjustments as needed.

Sales & Revenue

Sales and revenue information is an important metric to have on your dashboard. It would be best to look at things like your inventory, the ratio of products sold, and your profit margins. This data will help you understand what products are making you the most money, what customers are most interested in, and so on.

Margin Performance

One of the most critical metrics that every retail company should be monitoring is its margin performance. Observe how well your products are moving and how profitable they are overall. There are many different ways to monitor your margins, but you should ask yourself questions like the following.

What is My Profit on this Product?

Not all products in a retail store are going to be profitable. For instance, you may have many items that need to be sold for $5 each, but your profit margin is only $0.25. You should know which products are making you the most money and which are costing the most to adjust accordingly.

What Does My Profit Per-Unit Look Like?

If the profit per unit is low, you may want to consider raising prices on the items. It would be best to look at how your profit margin changes per product and its effect on your store.

Cost of Goods Sold

Cost of goods sold (COGS) is a metric that should be tracked on any retail industry dashboard. COGS is the cost of materials and products to make one unit of inventory. When calculating COGS, you need to take into account all raw materials and manufacturing costs and the cost of labor.

What’s included in COGS?

Typical items tracked in COGS include expenses that build up until the product is sold. Typically, the following items will be tracked:

Materials, which are everything used to create your product, including spare parts and packaging material
Factory/warehouse expenses, the expenditures related to the building where your items are produced or warehoused
Utilities, which include your electrical bills to power your manufacturing facility
Transportation, or the costs of shipping products to and from your warehouse
Advertising, which includes any money spent on marketing programs for promoting specific items or campaigns throughout the year. The more you invest in advertising, the better chance that people will buy those items instead of others
Administrative expenses, who stand for the miscellaneous costs that come with running a business, including office supplies, insurance, legal fees, and so on

Supply Chain Costs

Supply chain costs are an essential metric to track. Start by looking at the cost of your raw materials, how much it costs you to produce a product, and how much profit margin is left over after all production expenses are taken into account.

Cost of Transportation

Transportation is one of the highest costs that any business has. These are the costs of shipping goods to and from your warehouse, including the cost of gas and other expenses. You should monitor how much you are spending on transportation compared to your overall profit margin using a dashboard.

Costs Per-Employee

This is the amount of money you spend on each employee related to their wages, payroll taxes, and other employment-related benefits. Of course, this is all instrumental data for the executive team to help plan for future expenses and investments.

Store Traffic

Simply put, you need to know the number of customers visiting your store. You can track this data by counting the number of people coming into your store in a specific period, calculating how many walk-by customers you have, and identifying how many repeat customers you have. The more people who come into your store, or the more repeat customers who buy your product, the better off your business will be.

Growth Trends

Growth trends are a valuable thing to understand when it comes to your business. You should be able to identify what efforts you are making that have the most impact on growth and which ones don’t do much for you. You should also be looking at your growth trend over time, not just the last few months so that you can see if there is a long-term trend.

Customer Satisfaction Score

The success of any retail business depends on its customer base, so you need a way to measure how happy they are with their shopping experience.

What’s Your Customer Retention Rate?

To know if you are retaining your customers, you should be looking at how often they come back and buy from your store again. The higher this number is, the better off you’ll be in terms of customer retention rates and will eventually lead to more profits every month.

Ready to Get Started Using Dashboard?

As we explored, many different metrics can be tracked in a retail department dashboard. In addition to the ones mentioned above, you also have the freedom to add in your own metrics that you see fit for your own business. In reality, there are lots of possibilities!

For more information, please refer to the following pages:

Vital Metrics to Track in a Retail Industry Dashboard