Using POS Reports: Sales, Margins and Insights
How to generate and read POS reports in AskBiz — understanding your sales summary, margin analysis, best-selling products, and busiest trading periods.
Key Takeaways
- Operations > Reports shows pre-built reports for Sales Summary, Margin Analysis, Product Performance, and Staff Performance.
- All reports can be filtered by date range, branch, and sector — and exported to CSV.
- The Margin Analysis report is the most important for profitability: it shows which products you're actually making money on.
Where to find POS Reports
Go to POS > Operations > Retail > Reports. You'll see a menu of report types. The key reports are: Sales Summary (total revenue, transactions, refunds, and average sale by period), Product Performance (sales and margin by product), Staff Performance (revenue and transactions by cashier), and Margin Analysis (gross profit and margin % by product or category). Each report loads for your default date range and can be filtered and re-run.
Reading the Sales Summary
The Sales Summary shows your headline numbers for the period: total revenue, number of transactions, total refunds, net revenue (revenue minus refunds), average transaction value, and a day-by-day breakdown. Use this report for a quick weekly review — open last week's Sales Summary every Monday morning to understand what happened. If net revenue is significantly lower than revenue, investigate your refund rate using the Returns section.
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See this in action for your business
AskBiz tracks these metrics automatically — just connect your data and start asking questions.
Start for free →Using Margin Analysis to protect profitability
The Margin Analysis report is the most powerful for business health. It shows each product's revenue, cost of goods sold (COGS), gross profit, and margin percentage. Sort by Margin % ascending to find your lowest-margin products — these are the ones where pricing may need to be reviewed or where supplier costs are eating your profit. Sort by Gross profit descending to see your most profitable products in absolute terms. These are the products to prioritise stocking and promoting.
Product Performance: finding your bestsellers and slow-movers
The Product Performance report ranks products by units sold, revenue, and margin. Your bestsellers by units might not be your bestsellers by profit if they're low-margin items. The ideal products are those that rank highly on both units sold and margin %. Products with high units but low margin might be worth a price increase test. Products with low units and low margin are candidates for discontinuation — they take up shelf space and cash without contributing meaningfully.
Exporting reports for accounting
Every report has an Export CSV button. The export includes all rows visible in the report — no sampling or limits. Download your monthly Sales Summary and send it to your accountant. Download the Margin Analysis for VAT filing. For MTD (Making Tax Digital) VAT reporting specifically, use the MTD VAT button at the top of any POS screen — this generates a VAT-compliant summary for the month.