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Retail Transaction Analysis

Managing a business that conducts transactions in volume is difficult. Choosing which items to stock, what to charge, and where to display them can seem like guesswork. Tracking revenue and profits against time, sales, and waste can require hours of staring at spreadsheets. Business owners and CFOs spend hours trying to fix formulas, run macros, and format things so they can get insights from their spreadsheets. A truly useful tool would enable anyone to understand the operations of the business, thereby enabling communication and problem solving based on a shared understanding and single source of truth.

“If we have data, let’s look at data. If all we have are opinions, let’s go with mine.” *– Jim Barksdale, former Netscape CEO

Enter: Power BI

A picture is worth a thousand words, and even more data points. Power BI allows users to identify relationships in their date that remain intact when new data is added.

Ever wanted to see the popularity of your offerings by time of day? How about track the impact of a price change on sales? Anticipate stock outs to optimize ordering and preparation? Forecast for demand? Estimate the lost profits from closing for a day? With modern software tools, we can build a clean personalized interface to highlight the metrics vital to your success.

Case Study:

Bakery Management Dashboard

In the dashboard below we examined a simple record: One month of retail transaction history at a local bakery. This single data set was used to produce four Pages:

  1. An overview dashboard that summarizes top performing items for the month, revenue summary for the month, and high level operational metrics like Gross Revenue, Expenses, and Net Revenue.
  2. A Daily Sales breakout chart allowing users to examine sales makeup of a specific day.
  3. Sales Trends shows how each item on the menu has sold by day and as a cumulative total for the month.
  4. Product Level analysis, showing SKU summary data and item value add summaries for the month to highlight strong and weak performers.

Click on the image below to interact with this demo dashboard, hosted by Power BI.

Interactive dashboard of data for bakery All data contained in this demo dashboard has been mocked up for this demonstration and does not represent a real client.