Small businesses often overlook sales as a key metric, but it’s one of the most important aspects of running your business. Without a sales tracker, you are leaving your business in the dark and are unable to make informed strategic decisions. 

As your business grows over time, it’s important to monitor how well your business is performing and what areas need to be improved. Having the right tools and systems in place allow you to focus on growing your business and save time in the process.

Why is sales tracking important? 

1. It allows you to monitor your business’ performance

By tracking the revenue that your business generates from your clients and projects, you can gain a better idea of how your business is performing and identify areas for improvement

For example, if you notice that your sales are well lower compared to the previous quarter, you can look back at your marketing activities and determine what have you been doing differently. Maybe you changed your branding or the way you communicate with your audience? Maybe you published more of your work on another platform last quarter which brought you extra leads? 

Whatever it is, by having a real-time perspective on your sales performance, you can make quick adjustments and pivot your business in the right direction. 

2. You can understand how seasonality affects your sales

Sales fluctuate throughout the year as people have different buying habits throughout the year. For instance, you might notice that business slows down during the summer months because most people are on vacation; the same thing happens around Christmas.

You can use this information to plan your marketing around these seasons to better market your products and services to clients who may be more inclined to buy at certain times of the year. 

For example, you could run a special offer on your services over the summer to generate more interest in your offers. Knowing when your clients are most likely to buy can help to increase sales for your business and adapt your marketing strategies.

3. It allows you to make better projections and decisions for your business

As you collect more sales data, you can make better financial projections and predict whether you’ll meet your financial targets or not. Setting goals and making projections can be a bit of a hit-and-miss at the beginning, but the more data you collect, the more you will understand how money moves within your business and what are your peak sales seasons.  

Making more accurate financial projections for your business can also help you make better long-term growth-oriented decisions in your business like investing in new equipment, tools, or team members. If you know you’ll be on track to surpass your sales goal this year, and you’re well below your expense limit, then there’s a high chance that you will have enough profit at the end of the year to reinvest back in your business. Smart!

Overall, sales tracking provides you with valuable insights into the day-to-day performance of your business and helps you to make informed decisions to drive growth and success.

How we suggest starting tracking your sales

There are many different ways you can track your sales, so where should you start?

The first step is to determine what are your financial goals for the year. Having specific goals will help you stay on track and measure your progress throughout the year.

If you don’t set goals for yourself, it can be hard to know what to measure or compare at the end of the year to determine whether you’re meeting your targets.Then, start tracking your monthly sales. Keep track of how much you sell each month to help you gauge your overall progress and identify any seasonal trends. Think about how you can improve your sales numbers by identifying any weaknesses in your sales process. This might be something as small as improving your marketing communication, your client experience, your follow-up process, or reaching out to past clients to ask for a referral.

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Finally, set aside time every month, quarter, and year to do a deep dive into your numbers. Tracking your numbers isn’t the most fun part of running your business but it’s really important to make time for it. Block out time in your calendar to sit down and do an in-depth review of your financial performance, where you’ll look at your sales, expenses, and profits.

Monitoring how your business is doing compared to previous years will help you identify key trends, help you launch new offers or adapt existing ones and make informed decisions to help you scale.

How to track your sales

Now that you know which metrics to track, the next step is knowing how to track them. Using the right tool or software can help make the process easier and allow you more time to work on your business rather than in it. It’s important to use a sales tracker that allows you to easily input the information needed and get a visual representation of your performance. 

By signing up for a free Yocory account, you have access to our sales tracker tool, making the process of tracking sales a lot easier. Inside our sales tracker, you will find many features, including: 

• A section to input your yearly goals which are also broken down into quarterly and monthly goals.
• A section to track your yearly sales, and easily monitor your progress to achieving your yearly goal.
• You can see your sales year split quarterly and monthly, to compare your performance throughout the year.
• You can input your monthly sales and keep track of what services or products are performing the best each month so you can focus your time on improving them further.
• You can also see a visualisation of your data through a graph, allowing you to compare your sales each month.

We have built our sales tracker to help you with sales accountability, organisation and success.

Also included in our free account is an expense tracker and a profit monitor. The expense tracker allows you to track your business expenses and set yourself a yearly limit, to ensure you are not spending more than you are making. 

The profit monitor allows you to see how much profit you are earning before tax, and help you stay on track to reach your goals. With these extra features, you can easily get a full view of the financial performance of your business. 

So, if you are not already using some sort of tool or system to help you keep track of sales for your business, you should definitely start! And if you need an extra hand to get you started – sign up for a free Yocory account today to feel more in control of your finances and your business, or – if you prefer to use spreadsheets – then we have a handy free Sales Tracker template for you.