You’ve recognized the need for a data-informed strategy for your wholesale business, but what do you do with all the data you’re collecting? How do you use data to measure the success of your sales, order fulfillment, shipping, profitability, and so on? If you’re unsure of how to take full advantage of this information, this guide can help.

We’ve collated some of the key wholesale reports you can and should be using to monitor your business’ performance over time. We’ve also included ways that QuickBooks can help you keep track of these reports. Keep reading to identify what valuable reports you can gather for your business.

Sales Over Time by Customer

Building strong relationships with retailers is critical for wholesale e-commerce businesses, as merchant wholesalers tend to have a smaller but more regular customer base. By looking at your sales over a given time frame and breaking it down by customer, you can pinpoint your highest-value buyers. These will be individuals who you might choose to offer a higher level of service. You can also identify opportunities to convert small, long-term buyers into more valuable customers by implementing initiatives like minimum order quantities (MOQs).

Ship to Promise

One of the biggest indicators of customer satisfaction and the efficacy of your shipping strategy is ship to promise. Ship to promise is a measure of how quickly an order is fulfilled after being made. Quick and efficient shipping is imperative to the satisfaction of your customers. This is especially true for customers who rely on wholesale goods for resale at their own businesses.

Don’t let inefficient shipping processes come between you and your customers. If you’ve integrated your shipping provider with QuickBooks, you can easily analyze the time between ordering and fulfillment from an easy-to-read and accessible dashboard. This will allow you to see where your fulfillment team can improve to provide customers a faster delivery experience.

Sales Representative Performance

Having a high-performing sales team is crucial to the success of any wholesale business and is a powerful economic indicator. That said, there are more ways to evaluate their performance than with the number of successful or failed sales. To track performance, you need to know the details that lead to these sales and evaluate them closely.

You can use QuickBooks sales history report to review your history. With QuickBooks, you can filter report results to view all sales representatives, assignees, or other related personnel. This can help you track how individual members are performing and provide rewards to top employees to incentivize a higher standard of performance across the board.

On a higher level, this metric can also be compared to your revenue goals to evaluate the quality of your leads. By doing so, you can see whether you’re targeting the right audience and adjust accordingly.

Product Performance

Tracking product performance helps you identify the best-selling products as well as the low sellers. Having this insight enables you to better optimize inventory, make informed marketing and purchasing decisions, and mitigate the risk of dead stock and stockouts. The last thing you want is to have to deal with old inventory or unhappy customers. You can also begin forecasting and planning for the future with this information.

Keep in mind that individual product sales can fluctuate because of a number of factors, such as:

• Seasonal sales periods
• Product discounts
• Promotional pricing
• Effective marketing strategies
• Trends on social media

It’s important to use sales and inventory forecasting to account for these fluctuations. Use QuickBooks to track wholesale inventories and sales, and create revenue predictions all in one place.

Sales Cycle Length

Sales cycle length is the time it takes a salesperson to close a deal divided by the total number of deals made within that period. It’s also another way of answering the question, “How long did it take to close the deal?” The shorter the sales cycle, the more time your sales team has to nurture new leads and work on generating more sales. Ideally, you want this number to decrease over time or remain steady.

With QuickBooks, you can filter sales reports by time period so that you can see the sales made for the previous month, week, or day. You can also do this for multiple channels to ensure your sales team is shortening the sales cycle length across the board.

Use Reports to Their Full Potential

Collecting data is a meaningless activity if you don’t know how to analyze it, organize it into reports, and identify key insights. The right reports will make it easy to set benchmarks and track your performance over time. With QuickBooks, you gain access to valuable reports in real time so that your wholesale business is one step ahead of the competition. Additionally, generating these reports with QuickBooks can be done with just a few clicks. Start using data-driven reports to their full potential today.