Why It’s Important to Recap Your Sales (and How Boon Makes It Easier than Ever!)

Why It’s Important to Recap Your Sales (and How Boon Makes It Easier than Ever!)

When you’re running a product-based business, where trends shift quicker than customer preferences, it’s vital to stay ahead of the game—and figuring out WHY your sales are happening the way they are is key to providing you the information you need for strategic decision-making. That’s where sales recaps come into play. 

Sales recapping, the process of comparing and contrasting your current sales performance against your forecasted or planned sales performance, can be transformative for your businesses—but where do you start and how do you know if you’re doing it correctly? 

In this article, we’ll dig into the importance of regularly reviewing your sales, the data-driven insights the process uncovers, and how Boon has made it easier than ever with its custom-built Sales Recap Tool. 

“Hope is not a strategy”

If “Know your numbers,” is our office’s number one saying then, “Hope is not a strategy” is a very close second. At the core of effective retail management is strategy based on data and analysis. If your business isn’t performing quite the way you want, or even if it’s performing great and you want to keep it on track, you can’t assume things will just get better on their own.

You need to be proactive. Pulling at least a basic weekly recap can help a business keep a close eye on its assortment’s performance relative to your demand plan and inventory forecast.

What sales recapping unlocks

Sales recapping is a jumping-off point for digging into your business’ performance, helping you examine the data to see what is actually happening with sales and inventory.

By slicing your data into various segments and detecting patterns or trends, you can inform your forecast, refine assortments, adjust promotional strategies, and more.

In retail, specifics matter and sales recapping enables you to isolate information to identify patterns. Imagine your storefront sells candles—recapping your sales by common scent may help you see that woodsy scents are doing better than expected while fruity scents are underperforming—or you may find that when you recap candle size, without filtering scent, a sales trend emerges!

Sales recapping also identifies time-based trends in your business. You may start to see that most of your sales occur at specific times—whether it’s hours of the day, days of the week, weeks during the month, or months of the year. This can help you optimize inventory purchasing from your supplier as well as warehousing and other storage needs your business might experience.

Because businesses can sometimes sell out of product in one specific color, size, style, or category, recapping the rate of sale will help you understand which items are your strongest sellers. If you run out of one item soon after you started selling, you could probably have sold even more! Analyzing your rate of sale by specific product category or attribute can empower you to project your potential sales for any given item in your assortment.

Recapping by time frame can also help clue you into customer price sensitivity—if you run a special offer, comparing that timeframe to an average or week, it’s a helpful tool for determining the effectiveness of different types of sales, like how a ‘Buy One Get One’ promotion works versus a standard 30% off sale.

Regular recapping also empowers you to keep your KPIs in check, the performance indicators that help you to understand the macro trends of your business. Whether that’s detecting patterns that drive month-to-month variances or noticing higher or lower sales from one period to the next, detecting these changes in a timely manner allows you to stay informed as to what’s working or not. Whether these variances are driven by bad things (your website breaking down) or good things (an influencer sharing how much they love your product), you want to be able to react sooner rather than later.

While you likely already know that your sales differ from one month to the next, not taking the time to investigate WHY the variance occurred is a BIG miss. And while the practice of sales recapping may take some time to build into your business operations, it will ultimately keep you informed, insightful, and empowered to take action. Because wouldn’t you rather find out that your boat has a hole as soon as it appears—and not when it’s already halfway underwater?

Make Retail Magic with Boon’s Sales Recap Tool

It’s likely you’re already using some sort of tool to review your sales, but many e-commerce dashboards leave a lot to be desired. Boon is committed to offering excellent retail planning services to all retailers—no matter how big the team or small the budget, and while our services are flexible, we recognize that some retailers aren't ready for fully integrated support.

Based on feedback, input, and ideas from our retail connections in the industry, we knew there was a need for easy-to-use, downloadable tools. Oftentimes, start-up founders don’t have the knowledge or bandwidth to run in-depth recapping and analysis because they’re wearing so many hats in their business. So we developed our Sales + Inventory Planning Toolkit to provide them with the framework they need—without investing hours in building the tools themselves.

Here’s what makes our toolkit a must-have for small businesses:

• It’s plug and play: Our favorite toys are the ones you can take right out of the box and use right away. Our Sales Recap tool isn’t much different! Built to work with the leading e-commerce platform, Shopify, users can get right to recapping without a massive amount of set-up. But don’t worry—even if you don’t use Shopify, it’s easily customizable to your storefront’s needs.

• No separate software required: Available to use in both Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets, our Sales Recap Tool doesn’t require you to purchase a whole other program in order to use it, saving you time from both an implementation and training standpoint.

• Time is of the essence: The recapping tool empowers you to review and analyze sales by any timeframe. It’s built to recap weekly sales, month-to-date performance, and year-to-date sales results. Currently built through the selling year 2026, timeframes can easily be extended, edited, and customized.

• Any data you need—we’ve got it: The Boon Recap tool lets you slice your business into categories, colors, sizes, and more so you can review your sales based on your most common attributes and discover trends to get ahead of bestsellers and beyond.

• Performance at a glance: Built with a top and bottom 5-20 item view, the tool allows you to easily see your top- and low- performing items to easily know what inventory needs to be bought, and which items you might need less of.

• Customize as needed: The recap tool can be DIY-customized based on your store’s product category, subcategory, attribute, color, sizes, and cost.

• We’ve got your back: When you purchase the Boon recapping tool, you’re also getting an hour of time with one of our seasoned team members. This time is built around your needs, so you can ask questions about the tool if something doesn’t make sense, or lean on our team’s expertise to customize the tool for your business or sales platform.

Get Started Today!

Season after season, retailers continue to have to make predictions based on what’s previously occurred. So, until the technology of the crystal ball becomes more widespread, the Boon Sales Recap Tool is the next best thing! So, start building a robust sales history for your business today.