Reading your weekly report
What the Sunday summary is telling you, and which sentence to act on first.
The report arrives on Sunday evening and is written as sentences rather than charts. Each one is a statement about your own records, and each can be opened to show the workings behind it.
The three kinds of sentence
- What you keptWhat is left after the money that has to go back into stock and the money already owed out. This is the number that says whether the shop paid you this week, and it is almost always smaller than the cash box suggests.
- What is finishingItems running down, with a rough number of days left at the current rate. This is the one to act on first, because it is the only sentence with a deadline attached.
- What is sitting with customersYour total credit out, and how it compares with a normal week for you. A total that climbs for three weeks running is the early warning that matters.
The comparison is always against your own previous weeks, never against other shops. A quiet week in the rains is not a bad week, and the report is written so that it does not read like one.
If a sentence looks wrong, open it. Every figure traces back to the entries it came from, and a wrong figure almost always means a day was closed with a number that needs correcting.
If you miss a day
The report still comes, and it says which days had no entry rather than quietly averaging over them. A gap you can see is better than a total you cannot trust.
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