Inventory Planner’s KPIs report is a useful tool that gives merchants a lot of flexibility in assessing their business’s performance from a variety of perspectives. Using the KPI report and its metrics helps you determine whether there are one or two specific factors that are driving the sales trends, for better or worse, for any given product. With that information in hand, you can make key business decisions.

"KPI" stands for key performance indicator. KPIs help companies measure their strategic, financial and operational achievements, especially compared to other businesses' or to different time periods for the same business. Carefully planned KPIs and the commitment to track them help businesses succeed at their goals.

It's important for businesses to evaluate and re-evaluate their KPIs periodically to make sure they're still effective and relevant. Everyone in a business should be familiar with its KPIs and their role in affecting them.

Once you've set your KPIs, you can use the Inventory KPIs report to view your progress and measure it in a variety of ways. You can access the Inventory KPIs report under the "Reports" section on the left-hand side menu.

The Inventory KPI report is highly configurable. Options for customization include:

For example, being able to view your business’s performance by location or warehouse gives you a sense of whether some locations are performing better than others. Alternatively, you can look at your data through a variety of different dimensions:

As you get more granular in your assessment of your KPIs, you can zero in on what's impacting your business, letting you make informed decisions about how to change your strategy or tactics.

For example, you may find a product category is not meeting your sales expectations. The KPI report can then show you whether certain variants within the category are selling better than others, helping you make decisions about ordering and stocking.

Inventory Planner’s KPI report also allows you to compare metrics in different time periods. In some cases, you may want to compare one week or month to an earlier week or month. In the case of seasonal products, you can use the report to compare the performance of certain products from the same period in one year to another.

There are more than 125 metrics that can be incorporated into the KPI report. To select metrics shown in the report, click on the gear icon in the upper right corner. See the Glossary of Terms to learn more about the definitions and formulas used to calculate these metrics. 

Let’s take a look at how Inventory Planner’s KPI report can be useful to a business trying to assess its performance.

Say you’re selling fashion or other highly trendy items that tend to go in and out of style quite quickly, selling very well for a time and then dropping off.

With a KPI report, you can track weekly sales trends to stay on top of those products’ performance. If you have concerns you can look at the metrics by dimension to investigate. Maybe certain variants of the product are still selling quite well while others aren't, or some of your locations are selling more of the product than others, or sales are softening across all the metrics, indicating that product’s time may be over. The KPI report can capture and display this information for you.

If you’re selling products whose sales are driven largely by seasonality, you can compare sales trends from one year to another. So, for example, if back-to-school sales of backpacks are down from previous years, you can use the KPI report to take a look at certain metrics to see what’s affecting that.

Among the 125-plus metrics you can pull up in your KPI report are key measurements such as sell-through and stock turn.

Sell-through describes how much of your opening stock levels you sold during a selected period. It’s calculated by dividing sales during that period by your opening stock and multiplying by 100 to get a percentage. For example, if you want to turn over your inventory fully in a month, you’re aiming for a 100 percent sell-through for the month. 

Stock turn, on the other hand, helps to determine how quickly you're going through inventory and what factors are driving revenue, as well as shows you which items are sitting on your shelves for too long, tying up cash that could be used to buy faster-moving inventory. It's calculated by dividing sales by the average stock for the selected period, again multiplied by 100 to get a percentage.