What Could Go Wrong With Retail Budgeting?
Is your budgeting process contributing to costly errors?
The importance of retail budgeting is non-negotiable. Without a budget, you don’t know where your money is going and mistakes can be costly — as costly as losing your business. But long before things get that drastic there are clues to potential problems. Paying attention to what could go wrong in retail budgeting helps you avoid those problems before things get out of control.
Inadequate Retail Budgeting Software
The software used in retail budgeting must be designed for the unique factors that retail businesses encounter. When data collection is manual, for instance, the numbers you are viewing cannot be anything but historical because it takes time to collect information from every department and channel, then input it into a report and compile all the various reports once they are assembled.
A software platform like ChainDrive automates and streamlines the data collection process, eliminating the time lag and enabling the instant updating of information. Software that cannot do this is little more than a fancy calculator.
Unintegrated Data
You can have all your information and still have problems if you can’t filter and view that information appropriately. The ability to integrate data relies on the foundation of a central database with user-defined filters. For retail budgeting, it makes sense to view data at various levels so you see it in context. The same information may be needed to assess a store, or an assistant manager or a region or a season so that the budget is suitable in all contexts.
Because ChainDrive utilizes a centralized database and has customizable features, you automatically have the integration you need at the level you want for profitable decision making.
Inflexible Analysis
If a string of heavy storms overwhelms the downtown area with flooding, your downtown location is going to have significant differences in performance. Knowing detailed information on significant events provides the context needed for accurate analysis. Being able to go back to dates of poor performance and see an annotation that the downtown area was flooded not only explains lowered sales, it also explains a higher janitorial cost.
The ChainDrive Retail Budgeting component has an exclusive annotation feature that provides the integration of daily logs in your analysis along with other analytical tools that retailers have requested. ChainDrive provides the software and the support you need to design a retail budget that works for your entire business.
