Volo today announced enhancements to its Reporting & Analytics module – Volo Vision – including full cost calculations for profit and loss analysis. The upgraded module will help improve profitability and decision-making by delivering accurate visibility of margin, while enhancing productivity and reducing risk by eliminating manual data entry.
Volo Profit & Loss Reporting is free for Volo customers and improves profitability by presenting an accurate picture of the margin sellers make when they sell their items. The module enables granular recording and accounting for costs and analysis, down to the individual SKU level. Sellers can set the degree of detail required and introduce any costs outside of the Volo platform to deliver the most accurate profit or loss figure for a given item or order.
Volo Profit & Loss Reporting supports standard cost elements, including Channel fees, Shipping fees and Payment fees. There are also additional generic fee types that sellers can customise to suit their unique business such as foreign exchange, packaging, Amazon FBA or translation. Sellers only need to set up their fees once and these rules will be applied every time, saving time and reducing the risk of errors that arise from manual data entry.
A range of reports is available ‘out of the box’: The Margin Breakdown report by supplier, channel, channel account, country and folder plus an extensive range of filtering options; SKU Margin; Order Margin; Margin Performance; and a detailed Single Order report.
Paul Watson, CEO of Volo Commerce, said, “We know from our experience that many merchants and retailers either spend a lot of time and effort analysing their profit and loss, or don’t do enough of it. It also happens after the sale, and feels more like an audit than a way of actively doing business. We’ve brought the intelligence into our solution so that you can capture costs during the general course of your business and have the answers at your fingertips.
The New Year is never a bad time to assess profits and costs for a business, however even Volo’s superb reporting has hidden costs which might not be recorded such as packaging costs, staff, rent and utilities not to mention taxes.
For sole traders the annual reckoning with the tax man beckons, if you’ve not already done your tax return it’s time to get it done. If you have done it you should know what your overall profit percentage is, but are there SKUs that are more profitable than others and are their some that by the time the warehousing and processing costs are taken into account, it’s not really worth the effort selling them?
