Buyers Daily Report

The Buyers Daily Report is intended to give you as a buyer, the information you need to make the best decisions for your business on a daily basis.  This dashboard allows you to drill deeper into your data and answer many business questions that drive your decisions about vendors, inventory, margins, and how you are tracking against prior year metrics.  You control the time frame in view with the Date filter to the right of the dashboard.  You can also select specific inventory using a tiered filter. The ability to select and drill deeper allows you to see your data at whatever level is important to your current need, right down to the item level.

It is important to note that the data considered begins with the date on the heading panel of the dashboard, under Earliest Transaction Date.  This means that your trends and filtered data will start with the transactions on this date.

You will see a link to this document in the heading of the dashboard, click on Dashboard Help to access the document.

At the top of the dashboard are graphics that show your Sales & Items for Yesterday, This Week, This Month, This Quarter & This Year - and how they are tracking towards the same periods a year ago.  Use these as a starting point to understand how your business is performing, and where you can make adjustments to affect that performance.  You'll notice a few pivot tables under the graphics, which you control with the dashbaord filters as well as the ability to add or remove fields from the tables. Here you can see things like a Top 50 list of item sales dollars for each of the time frames, which of your items are driving current business, and how business is stacking up by sales, cost, items and margins - clicking on the arrow at the top of each column will adjust the sorting of the data.

To the right of the dashboard are your filters - first choose the time period that you want to review.  The Date filter will affect the data tables; it will not affect the graphics, which are preset to the time frames in the headings.  You are also able to filter by several layers of dependent inventory properties - for example, if you filter on a Category / Type XYZ, the filters below Category / Type will list only inventory that is in Category / Type XYZ; this will help reduce the listings to more manageable filters.  You can select specific items or groups of items - this will focus the dashboard information to the area you need to review. You are able to filter by location as well.

Use the Date filter to see the table data in a variety of forms - one example is when comparing vendor allocations in the current month to the same month a year ago.  Simply choose the List option in the filter, go to Months and choose the specific months you want to review.  The data tables will reflect only the selected months, making it easier for you to focus on that data.

The first data table shows your Sales, Cost and Gross Margin - initially listed by Type.  You are able to add or remove fields from the table by right clicking in the header or areas.

The next one shows your top 50 items based on the date range filtered. This is a quick look at your business drivers and how they are performing during the time period you are reviewing. Pay attention here to all of the variables - remember that a single metric generally does not tell the whole story. You may see an extraordinary gross margin rate, yet the gross margin dollars are not as significant. You may see that highest selling items could bring even better results if you can lower the cost.

The next section shows sales dollars and quantities sold by vendor, and gives you a comparison to all vendors. By right clicking in the header or row area, you can add or remove fields to better focus the table. For example, by removing the Date field, you can see the aggregated values for the date range you have selected; or you can add a row for a different category level to understand larger, or smaller groupings of your data.

These tables can be exported to work with the data outside the dashboard. Do this by clicking on the 3 dots at the top right corner of the widget, choose Download and export an image or file.  The recommended file type for a spreadsheet is CSV.