What is a Sales Report?

A sales report is a report that provides an in-depth sight into your sales team’s performance, including their successes and their shortcomings, as well as the customer shopping data. This assists you in your sales analysis.

In your report, you can see such information as current and past sales and emerging trends that matter most to your business. The sales report doesn’t have to be purely numbered, nor paragraph upon paragraph of dry information. You can make it visually appealing by adding in a chart, line, and bar graphs.

Three Steps to Simplify the Daily, Weekly, and Monthly Sales Reports 

The daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly report is the most common way to track sales performance. It is also necessary to send the sales report with top management during the timed marketing promotions or seasonal spikes.

Although the content varied in the daily, weekly, and monthly reports, generating these reports is the same. Here, I will take the weekly sales report as an example.

The core of simplifying weekly sales reports is report automation; the most important are automated data entry and reporting.

You may use Python and Excel to meet these needs. However, the code is time-consuming. Here, I would recommend the software requires low code that can be easy to operate with its drag&drop interface. 

1.Gather the right data for weekly reports

For example, I am the manager of the regional sales team. My weekly task is to generate weekly sales reports based on the data I collected from each sale. I have to send excel files to them and merge the data from the excel files they send back to me. The difficulty is combining the data is time-consuming.  

Using a reporting tool such as FineReport is easy to solve the problem. FineReport provides a data entry function. That is, users can fill data back to the database via online forms. In this way, you can send the online forms you set formats in advance to your team; the database where you stored the data will be updated once they enter the new data. 

If your data volume is not large, you can also import excel data into FineReport in batches. It is convenient to import data from Excel to FineReport in a few clicks after designing the importing templates based on EXCEL sheets.

Besides, if the sales data is stored in the ERP, CRM, or other business systems, as long as the data are input into your business systems, FineReport also can extract data from these systems and update the data in real-time.

2. Automate the sales reports generation with the report templates. 

With the data collection problem solved, it is time to make a weekly sales report. But it would be the best solution if I only need to make a weekly report once, and then the reports can be automatically generated when the database is updated.

FineReport can also realize it. First, use the sales templates built in the designers mentioned above, or you can customized the templates and save them. You can reuse it when making a weekly sales report next time. 

 It dramatically reduces the time on making the report. 

3. Share the reports with your team or your manager

The weekly sales reports should be reported to your mananger regularly. You may still report it manually every Sunday. However, the report will be delayed once you have some emergency to deal with.

 With the schedule function of FineReport, you will be liberated from the repeated work.

If you’re a sales manager who waits for someone to submit a weekly report, you only need to check the reports on FineReport app or in your mail box. You can monitor your sales performance anytime, anywhere. 

If you are responsible for making weekly reports, you can make full use of FineReport’s regular scheduling and message reminding function to set generating reports regularly and pushing the daily and monthly reports to the corresponding managers.

4 Types of Sales Report Templates

Sales management

The sales management report allows managers to track the progress and activity of the sales team. It is easy to monitor real-time sales performance by different dimensions such as product, region, customer, channel, and revenue. So the managers can have a comprehensive view of sales performance and adjust the sales strategies timely. 

Overall Sales Performance

The sales performance report shows each sales rep’s performance, with their progress over the same period last year. It also allows you to monitor company’s sales performance and target achievement progress. To understand the detailed information in each region, you can drill down to the provinces and cities.

Multi-Dimensional Sales Analysis

A sales analysis dashboard makes you better understand the sales performance by product, region, or branch. You can view revenue and profit from multiple dimensions, convenient for in-depth research on specific regions and products, ultimately improving the corresponding sales strategy.

Sales Leaderboard

Sales leaderboards are a great way to track individual sales performance and motivate the team to hit targets. You can see who’s performing best on your team across multiple sales metrics and KPIs. And making the data available to the entire business can develop friendly competition within your sales team.

Summary

A sales report is critical in sales activities while simplifying the process of sales reports is easy with the sales reporting software. If you are interested in the FineReport mentioned above, you can download it and get a free trial.