How to Write Better Sales Recaps: A 5-Step Framework for Retail Teams
5 Steps to Better Sales Recaps
One of the most important parts of running a successful retail business is recapping your sales, analyzing performance trends, and utilizing your data to make better assortment planning decisions. The insight available in your sales and inventory data will determine which products you should reorder and chase inventory on, and which items to mark down and move on from.
While the concept of sales recapping and reviewing retail KPIs is simple, it takes an experienced analyst to get the most out of the valuable information you already have at your fingertips.
Consider your current recap process: Are you organizing it and reviewing it in a way that enables stronger inventory planning and more strategic demand forecasting? Ever feel like you could be going more in depth? Detailed and intuitive sales recap reports are one of the retail business services we offer at Boon. Lean on our expertise! Review a sample sales recap here. Read on to see five of our time-tested key steps to creating sales recaps that work best for our clients.
Step 1: Choose the crucial metrics for your business
Every retail business is different, and there are dozens of metrics you could use to evaluate your sales and inventory performance. Your first job is deciding which retail metrics matter most to your day-to-day operations and long-term goals.
Most brands start by reviewing sales dollars and units, but you’ll also want to factor in gross sales vs. net sales so you can understand how discounts, promotions, and returns impact your retail profitability.
You’ll also want to track gross margin dollars and percent, two universal KPIs that reveal your assortment’s true productivity. Monitoring these metrics over time helps you understand seasonality, new product performance, category profitability, and overall inventory health.
Depending on your business model, you may want to add additional retail KPI tracking such as AUR, UPT, and AOV:
Average Unit Retail (AUR): sales dollars ÷ sales units
Units Per Transaction (UPT): units sold ÷ number of transactions
Average Order Value (AOV): sales dollars ÷ number of transactions
These metrics deepen your sales analysis and help inform pricing, promotions, and customer behavior trends.
Next, add essential inventory metrics like on order (OO), sell-through rate (ST%), and weeks of supply (WOS) — all powerful tools for proactive inventory management.
Your current system may not automatically pull all this together, and that’s where Boon comes in. We specialize in creating customized sales and inventory recap tools that unify data from multiple sources. Whatever software you’re using today, we can help you build a smarter, more streamlined recap process.
Step 2: Identify the time frames that are important to you
Most retail teams use weekly sales recaps, but understanding longer timeframes — monthly, quarterly, seasonal, and yearly — provides a more complete picture for future sales forecasting and inventory planning.
Consider how you want these time frames displayed:
Do you want to see % to monthly or quarterly goal in your weekly recap?
Do you want year-over-year performance included?
Do you track seasonal builds or trends across multiple years?
Brands that do this well can see seasonality, quickly identify over- and under-performing periods, and use those insights to forecast more accurately.
Longer-range recaps are also essential for assortment planning. For example, if tops consistently outperform bottoms each spring, you may want to expand that category next year.
Step 3: Determine the categories or attributes you want to evaluate
Another critical step in building effective sales recaps is deciding which product categories or attributes to evaluate.
Rolling up performance by category helps you understand:
Which categories are most profitable
Where inventory is turning fastest
Whether seasonality affects specific product lines
What categories may have expansion opportunities
If you’re an apparel business, you may also want to examine style, size, or color selling. These insights are foundational to SKU-level demand forecasting and help you plan future buys accurately.
Understanding color trends helps you protect inventory for core colors and better estimate buys for seasonal or fashion colors. Reviewing size selling helps you identify extended size needs and reduce size-based stockouts or overbuys.
A simple structure within Excel or Google Sheets — using clear attribute coding — can unlock this level of analysis. (Check out our video tutorial for helpful formulas.)
Step 4: Analyze sales by location or channel
Another high-value way to enhance your sales recap process is by breaking down performance by location or sales channel.
Ask yourself:
Where is your product sold?
Do you want to see all channels summarized together or broken out separately?
Do you need visibility into wholesale vs. DTC trends?
If you manage both wholesale and direct-to-consumer, understanding how each channel is actualizing against forecast is essential for accurate inventory allocation and avoiding forecasting errors.
When one wholesale partner overperforms, you may need to chase inventory. If another underperforms, you may need to adjust future buys or production.
Weekly channel-level analysis gives you:
Faster reaction time
More predictable inventory flow
Better replenishment planning
Higher forecast accuracy
Step 5: Summarize key findings
After reviewing your metrics, timeframes, categories, and channels, your last step is synthesizing the story the data is telling you.
Ask yourself:
What are the biggest surprises?
How close are you to your sales forecast?
Which products need rebuys?
Which items are underperforming and require markdowns or inventory action?
How is your margin actualizing?
What qualitative factors (marketing, promotions, delays) influenced sales?
This summary transforms your recap from a report into a strategic merchandise planning tool. It guides pricing decisions, assortment strategy, replenishment planning, and future forecasting.
The Bottom Line
Using these five steps to create better sales recaps will empower your team to make stronger decisions in both the short and long term. If your brand is struggling with the sales recap process, lacks bandwidth, or needs help building the right retail reporting templates, Boon can help.
Effective sales recaps are the cornerstone of successful inventory planning, demand forecasting, and merchandise planning. Investing in this process ensures you’re making data-backed decisions that support profitable growth.
Get started with us to elevate your sales recap process without adding extra workload to your team. And don’t forget to sign up for our LinkedIn newsletter for more retail planning tips delivered straight to your inbox.