Your sales report is a reflection of your marketing and sales efforts. Analyzing the sales report helps you know if you are still in your target market’s good graces, and develop the best plan to position your brand to meet your customers’ needs.

The end goal of your sales report form is to track growth and profitability by looking at an undistorted view of your business’ performance trends, customer preferences, and market opportunities. Let’s look at making a good sales report form and how to create them.

Understanding Sales Report Forms

A sales report form lets you capture and analyze your company’s sales activities. It quantifies sales performance using different metrics and provides insights for improving sales strategies, forecasting, and the general business health.

As a stakeholder, the sales report form helps you track the performance of individuals and teams and helps you identify market and growth opportunities. It tracks progress sales, marketing, and product management teams’ progress toward achieving their goals and helps them make data-driven decisions. For example, you can use the data from the sales report form to measure sales performance and general business health. You can also use it to make strategic decisions such as product launches, extensions, and brand partnerships.

Importance of Sales Report Forms

Here are the major reasons why you need a sales report form:

• Tracking Sales Performance: It enables you to track metrics such as sales volume, revenue generated, conversion rates, and average deal size. This allows companies to monitor progress toward sales goals, identify trends, and assess the effectiveness of sales strategies.
• Impact on Sales Strategies and Forecasting: Sales report forms help you improve your sales strategies and forecast by giving you meaningful historical information to estimate future sales performance. You can then use the information to prepare your budget and allocate resources.
• Contribution to Overall Business Health and Growth: You can use the sales report form to spot loopholes when analyzing the sales data. You can use this data to streamline your operations e.g. pull specific products from the market or rebrand them if they are not meeting customers needs. You can also use the sales report to inform your promotion efforts and improve customer service to maximize your growth.

Essential Content of a Sales Report Form

The following is the most important information for your sales report form:

• Basic Information: The date of the report, the timeframe covered by the report, and the salesperson or team responsible for the sales data entry.
• Sales Data: The total sales volume (the total amount of revenue generated from all sales during the reporting period), number of transactions (total number of individual sales completed within the timeframe), and the average transaction value (total sales volume divided by the number of transactions).
• Product Information: This includes the product sales figure (sales by product to see their contribution to overall sales), best-selling products (products with the highest number of sales), and product returns/cancellations (number of returns per product with the reason for return).

Customer Information

• Conversions: Number of customers who placed an order for the very first time during the reporting period.
• Returning Customers: The number of returning customers who came back for repeat purchases. You can use this to gauge customer loyalty and satisfaction.
• Customer demographics and preferences: Capture demographic information, such as age and location, and purchasing preference, if applicable, to understand your customer base better.

Sales Activities Data

• Number of Calls/Meetings: The total number of sales calls or meetings within the reporting period. This will give insights into the level of sales effort and lead generation.
• Follow-up Activities: The number of follow-up activities conducted with a prospect or existing client.
• Lead Generation Activities: As a metric for evaluating the effectiveness of lead generation activities, this can be used, especially for social media campaigns.

Financial Metrics

• Revenue Generated: Net amount of money earned from sales, after deducting all types of returns or discounts.
• Profit Margins: Profit made within the sales period considering only the cost of products and any other expenses.
• Sales Expenses: All expenses incurred on account of sales should be accounted for, like marketing expenses, travel expenses, and commissions.

Analysis and Insights

• Sales Trends: Sales data over time to recognize a pattern of growth, seasonal fluctuation, or an area of improvement.
• Comparison with previous periods: Comparing the sales performance in the current period against the past periods to monitor progress and improvement.
• Insights on Sales Performance: Several factors can influence sales, including customer behavior, employee workload, and market trends.

Future Projections

• Sales Objectives for Next Period: Setting realistic, measurable sales objectives for the next reporting period.
• Target achievement plans: Define the specific strategies and action plans that are to be executed to achieve the defined sales targets.
• Potential Problems and Their Solutions: Highlight the potential problems that may hinder sales performance and suggest their solutions.

Types of Sales Report Forms

There are different types of sales report forms and they all have their use cases, let’s take a look at them:

1. Daily Sales Report

Gives you a picture of the sales that took place per day and helps you spot discrepancies in your inventory vs sales record. It helps you see if you are meeting your daily sales targets, track the inventory, and spot potential stockouts. You can also use it to measure the effects of short-term promotions on your daily sales.

• Key Metrics for daily sales report: Your daily sales report form should include price, products sold, units of each product sold, product name, total amount sold per product, total sales amount,  tax per product, total tax, and sales amount after tax.

2. Weekly Sales Report

It gives an overview of the sales activities each week to help you see sales trends and compare performance against weekly targets. You can use it for analyzing sales trends and evaluate the effectiveness of weekly marketing campaigns.

• Key Metrics to Include: It uses the same metrics as daily sales aggregates but compares the previous week’s sales to the current week’s.

3. Monthly Sales Report

Offers a broader perspective on sales performance over one month. This data is invaluable for analyzing overall sales trends, identifying areas for improvement, and making strategic adjustments It helps you track progress toward achieving monthly sales goals. It also allows you to compare monthly sales performance to budgets and forecasts and analyze the effectiveness of monthly sales initiatives.

• Key Metrics to Include: It uses the same metrics as daily and weekly sales reports but compares the sales to the projected sales or the previous month. You can use the monthly sales report form data to calculate your monthly customer acquisition cost (CAC), customer lifetime value (CLV), and sales team performance for different products.

4. Quarterly Sales Report

Provides a high-level view of sales performance over a three-month quarter. Useful for evaluating long-term trends, assessing seasonal variations, and making strategic decisions for the upcoming quarter. Helps you Analyze year-over-year sales trends by quarter, Identify areas for improvement and set strategic goals for the next quarter. It also helps evaluate the effectiveness of long-term marketing campaigns.

• Key Metrics to Include: It uses the same metrics as monthly sales but records sales per quarter side by side. Beyond the standard reporting of daily, weekly, and monthly data, this comprehensive tool allows you to assess your market share, sales pipeline, and return on investment.

5. Annual Sales Report

Gives you a comprehensive review of sales performance for the entire year. It shows you the overall sales performance and helps you set goals for the following year. You can use it to analyze the year-over-year sales growth and profitability, identify the key performance areas, the areas that need improvement, and set strategic sales goals and initiatives for the next year.

• Key Metrics to Include: It follows the same metrics as your order sales report form but contains way larger data. You have data on how each product performed, how different regions performed. Gives you the number of acquired customers, repeat customers, and your actual product sales versus the forecasted value. This helps you see your customer churn rate, employee productivity, region performance, and overall revenue as well as profit generated.

Creating Effective Sales Report Templates

Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you create your sales report form:

Customization Tips

• Specify Metrics: First, define the metrics that are most relevant to the sales team KPIs. This helps in knowing exactly what to include on the sales report form template: sales figures, conversion rates, lead generation metrics, etc. To gain deeper insights, consider creating multiple sales report forms to track data across various periods or departments.
• Improve Usability and Readability: by applying consistent formatting to the headings, fonts, and all data entry fields. Also, be sure to clearly label the fields so they do not get mixed up.
• Visual Storytelling: When presenting your sales report to the stakeholders, use visual aids like charts and graphs so they easily under the sales performance and can make decisions based on that. 

Choose Your Sales Report Form Tool

Depending on your company’s budget and how big your business is, there are different solutions to help you record and track your sales. 

• Spreadsheet: You can use spreadsheets like MS Excel, Google Sheets, or Zoho Sheets. 
• Sales Report Form Template: You could also opt for a sales report template with customizable fields that allow you to record your sales. By using our pre-built form fields, you can simplify the process and save your team time. The intuitive design makes it easy for your sales team to navigate. Plus, integrating the form with your CRM and lead generation tools will streamline your sales process and enhance lead generation efforts. This is great for small to medium-sized businesses; it removes the stress of manual entry, makes sales team tasks easier, helps you visualize sales data, and is affordable.
• Sales Reporting Software: These are way more advanced sales reporting tools. Rather than manual data entry, our tool automatically generates sales data from your POS. Similar to sales report forms, it offers advanced automation at a slightly higher cost. This is a great solution if you’re a very large corporation and have a profit margin wide enough to absorb the cost.

Conclusion

Your sales report form shows your revenue health and helps know if your marketing and promotions efforts are worth it. They help you see new growth opportunities and how well your target audience is receiving your products/services.

We hope this guide makes creating your sales report form easier and helps you drive your business growth and profit. Here’s a sales report template to get you started.