The 5 numbers every small shop should check weekly

Every shop owner watches the daily takings. It is the first number you see and the last one you think about before locking up, and on its own it is close to useless. It tells you money came in. It does not tell you whether you kept any of it, whether you sold the right things, or whether you turned anyone away empty handed.

Five other numbers do. None of them need an accounting background, and checking all five takes about ten minutes once a week.

1. Gross margin, not revenue

Revenue is what came through the till. Margin is what is left after you subtract what the goods cost you to buy, and it is the number that pays your rent.

The calculation is one line: take your total sales for the week, subtract the cost price of everything you sold, and divide by total sales to get a percentage.

Watch the percentage, not just the amount, and watch it week to week. A busy week at a bad margin is worse than a quiet week at a good one, and takings alone will tell you the opposite. If margin slides while sales hold steady, something specific has happened: a supplier put prices up and nobody changed the shelf price, or you have been discounting harder than you meant to.

2. Your top ten by margin, not by units

Every POS shows best sellers by units sold. That list is worth a look, but the products that move the most are often the ones you make the least on.

Pull the same top ten ranked by total margin instead, which is margin per unit times units sold, and compare the two lists.

Where a product appears high on both, you have a genuinely good line, so protect its stock and its shelf position. Where it is high on units and missing from the margin list, it is a footfall product: people come in for it, and it earns its place by bringing them through the door, but it does not deserve a discount or your best display space. Where it is high on margin and low on units, you have found the thing worth pushing. That is the item to move to the counter, to mention when someone is deciding, and never to let run out.

3. Stock sitting still

Anything you have not sold a unit of in sixty days is not stock. It is cash sitting on a shelf, taking space a moving product could use.

Run the list weekly and keep it short. There are only three sensible answers. Mark it down until it moves, even at a loss: the money is already spent and the only question is how much you get back. Bundle it with something that does sell. Or accept it was a bad buy, sell through what is left, and take it off the reorder list.

The one answer that is not sensible is leaving it there and hoping. Slow stock does not get faster with age.

4. What went out of stock

This is the number nobody checks, because it is invisible. A stock-out never appears in a sales report. The customer who wanted it and did not find it leaves no trace: no sale, no line, nothing to add up at the end of the week.

So it has to be tracked deliberately. Ask your system what hit zero this week and keep the list. If the same product appears three weeks running, your reorder point is wrong, not your luck.

This is also where accurate stock figures stop being an accounting nicety. If your system thinks you have four of something and the shelf has none, you will never see the stock-out and you will never reorder. That is why the figure underneath all of this has to be one you trust, and why a rolling stock take earns its fifteen minutes a morning.

5. Average basket size

Divide total sales by the number of sales. That is your average basket, and it is the cheapest growth lever a small shop has, because moving it needs no extra footfall.

Two things move it reliably. Put small, genuinely useful items where people are already standing still, at the counter and in the queue. And give staff one specific thing to mention, not a general instruction to upsell: the battery for the thing they just bought, or the second one at a better price. One relevant suggestion beats five vague ones.

Ten minutes, same time every week

Pick a quiet hour and make it the same hour every week. Same principle as counting stock a section at a time: a short routine survives, and a monthly review of everything gets postponed until it turns into an annual review of nothing.

Comparing this week to the same week last year is where a lot of the value is, and report history is one of the first things a free plan tends to limit, so it is worth knowing what your plan retains.

Getting these without a spreadsheet

All five come out of ordinary sales and stock data, so none of them should need rebuilding by hand. StoreWave records a cost price against every product and moves stock with every sale, and its reports give you sales and order counts by period, top products by units and by value, and an inventory list with stock levels and stock value. Each one exports to a file. Ten minutes, once a week, and then back to the shop.