What management reporting is for
Management reporting gives the people running the business a regular, agreed view of how it is performing. In wholesale and distribution, that view usually needs to bring together sales, margin, stock and money owed, which often sit in different systems.
The aim is not more reports. It is one set of figures that finance, sales and operations all accept, produced the same way each month.
Sales and margin
Sales on their own say little about how the business is doing. The more useful questions are about margin and where it comes from.
- Sales and gross margin by customer, product group and sales representative.
- Margin movements compared with the previous month and the same month last year.
- Customers or products whose margin has fallen, while there is still time to act.
- The effect of credit notes, returns and rebates on the margin actually earned.
Stock and dispatch
For a distributor, stock is often the largest use of cash. Stock and dispatch figures are checked against the warehouse or dispatch system they come from.
- Stock value and quantity by product group and location.
- Slow-moving and aged stock.
- Orders taken compared with orders dispatched and invoiced.
Debtors and cash
Sales only help the business once customers settle their invoices. An aged debtors view by customer, alongside sales and margin for the same customers, shows which accounts are worth the most attention.
A monthly pack and day-to-day dashboards
Two kinds of reporting usually serve a wholesale business well. The monthly management pack is the agreed record for the month, with financial totals reconciled to the ledger where that applies. Power BI dashboards cover day-to-day questions such as today's orders, stock positions or overdue accounts, and alerts can flag figures that need a closer look.
Both should use the same definitions, so a figure on a dashboard and the same figure in the monthly pack mean the same thing.
Start from the systems already in place
Most businesses already hold the data they need across an accounting package, an order or EPOS system, a warehouse system and some spreadsheets. Management reporting can be built on those systems without replacing them. The first step is to map which system holds which figure, and agree how each figure is defined.
A reporting assessment does that mapping: it reviews the systems, the data and the reporting requirements, and recommends what to build first.