What's selling, and what's worth selling

Retail is the part of a salon most likely to be carried on instinct. You know what sells because you can picture the shelf. What's harder to picture is which of it is actually making you money, and which has been sitting there since spring.

Two places answer that, and they answer different halves.

The insights screen

Products → Insights, top right of the product list. It has no menu entry of its own, which is the main reason it goes unused.

Six things, each run on demand:

• Low-margin products — everything priced below your own average margin, with a suggested fix for each. It compares you against you, so it works whatever your pricing looks like.
• Stock-out forecast — which tracked products will run out soon, from recent sales velocity against what's on the shelf.
• Possible duplicates — the same item entered twice. Worth running once before you trust any product report, because a split product understates both halves.
• Inventory anomalies — the last 30 days scanned for large recounts, heavy use of the catch-all Other adjustment, and professional-use spikes.
• Expiring soon — anything dated within 90 days, for products that track expiry.
• Cost-of-goods Q&A — ask about cost and margin in a sentence.

Bulk update sits alongside them, for pushing a change across many products at once. A supplier price rise is the case it's built for — and running Low-margin products straight afterwards is how you find what that rise quietly did to your margins.

The reports

Insights is about what's worth selling. What actually sold is in Reports, and five of them are about products:

• Product Sales — units and revenue per product. Your best sellers.
• Cost of Goods Sold — retail cost against retail revenue, with gross margin per product. The one that turns a best seller into a profitable one.
• Product Inventory — what's on the shelf right now, per product and location, at cost and at retail.
• Product Inventory Changes — every movement in the period.
• Product Stock & Usage — how each product moved: received, sold, returned, used professionally, written off.

Cost of Goods Sold is the one to run first if you only run one. Product Sales ranks by revenue; Cost of Goods Sold ranks by what you kept.

The number nobody looks at

Product Inventory values your shelf at cost. That figure is money you have already spent and not yet recovered, and it appears on no sales report — a good retail month and a warehouse in your back room look identical from the sales side.