Understanding Your Sales Dashboard

Check daily

• Today's revenue against the same weekday last week — a same-day comparison, not against yesterday, which is skewed by weekly patterns.
• Top-selling and bottom-selling items — a sudden drop in a normally reliable item usually means a stock-out, not a demand change.
• Any transaction flagged for manual review — voids, large discounts, refunds outside policy.

Check weekly or monthly

• Revenue by hour of day, to catch a slow shift before it becomes a staffing decision.
• Customer retention and repeat-visit rate — this moves slowly enough that daily checking is just noise.
• Margin trends by category, which only become meaningful once you have enough transactions to smooth out day-to-day variance.

Setting a threshold that means something

A dashboard is only useful if you've defined what "normal" looks like for your business first. A 10% dip in a stable category is worth a look; the same dip in a category that swings 30% week to week anyway is meaningless. Set your alert thresholds based on your own historical variance, not a default percentage that came with the software.