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If you run a farm store, you know that long-term success is based on constantly improving the way you do business. But making meaningful changes is difficult if you don’t have a clear idea of what’s working and what isn’t.
Learning how to use the reports on your farm store point of sale (POS) or e-commerce platform can help. Sales and inventory reports give you an unbiased view of your store’s financial performance, giving you insights to help you dial in your pricing strategy, improve product selection, and reduce costs.
In this guide, we’ll give you a quick introduction to farm store sales reporting by showing you a few of the most useful reports on GrazeCart, along with specific examples of how a small business might use them.
Farm Store Metrics You Should Be Tracking
It’s hard to make improvements to your marketing or production processes if you don’t measure them. While your farm store POS or e-commerce platform likely includes reporting and analytics tools, they can be overwhelming if you don’t know what to look for.
We recommend you start by looking at these key metrics:
- Fulfillment accuracy: Track the number of orders that are packed correctly with no issues, and how many are flagged by customers with errors.
- Conversion rate: Measure how many people visit your website or come into your physical store and leave, versus how many people make a purchase.
- Profit margin (by item, by order, by category): Understand how much money you’re earning after production, packaging, and shipping costs.
- Production and shipping costs: Look into how efficient your packing processes are, along with how much you’re spending on packaging and delivery (on average).
- Average order size: See how much your average customers buy on a given trip, and if that amount increases over time or while running promotions.
- Reorder rate: Understand how many new customers you’re bringing in and, more importantly, how many are coming back (and how often).
Don’t forget to trust your gut. You have a general idea of which parts of your farm store business are performing well and which could use some help.
These metrics don’t replace your instincts — they give you an honest view to back them up.
5 Reports You Can Use To Run Your Farm Store Efficiently
Looking to make improvements to your farm store marketing, reduce operating costs, or simply make some improvements to your daily processes, but aren’t sure where to start?
Here are a few reports you can use to make meaningful changes.
Note: We’re specifically drawing on GrazeCart’s reports here for practical reasons, but most specialized systems made for food selling have similar analytics.
1. Harvest Report
Many farm stores sell the same base product (e.g. ground beef, chicken thigh) across multiple product types and bundles. For example, you might sell eggs by the dozen, in six packs, or part of a breakfast bundle with milk and bacon. When these items are all tracked as separate inventory items, it can be tricky to prepare orders, track sales data, and monitor your inventory levels.
The harvest report helps you overcome this challenge.
What it is: A harvest report consolidates sales performance data between products that have shared inventory inputs.
Why it’s helpful: This report helps you generate accurate product pick reports or evaluate sales performance on individual items when you have a lot of shared inventory products.
An example: Say you have six different ways of selling ground beef at your farm store:
- By the pound
- 1 lb. packs
- 5 lb. packs
- Preformed burger patties (x4)
- Ground beef and pork bundle (2 lb. each)
- Beef sample box (2 lb. ground beef, 2 rib eyes, 2 sirloins)
All of these items include ground beef, but may be tracked separately on your system, or are a combination of different types of inventory. By configuring each item to be linked to the original inventory input, you can get a consolidated view of your ground beef sales overall across all your different SKUs.
If you filter the same report by order status, you can create a consolidated pick list (i.e. how much total ground beef needs to be picked for all current unfulfilled orders).
Filtering down by month also tells you how much total ground beef you’ve sold throughout the year (and which specific products were contributing the most to ground beef sales).
2. Inventory Valuation Report
Dialing in the right price for your products isn’t easy. In truth, we often see farmers undervalue themselves because they set their pricing on a gut feeling or try to be competitive with grocery stores or big-brand online services instead of basing it on actual costs.
An inventory valuation report shows you exactly what your unsold stock is worth, so you can understand your cost of goods sold (COGS) and get an accurate view of your gross profit.
What it is: An inventory valuation report calculates the combined cost of your materials on hand, including any items that have shared inventory inputs.
Why it’s helpful: Periodically checking the value of your inventory helps you understand the profitability of your business, comparing sales against the value of your unsold goods. It also gives you a picture of how the raw costs of your products change throughout the year.
An example: Say you process a batch of three grass-fed steers in September. Across the batch, total costs come to over $10,000 (including feed, processing fees, and packaging). After processing, this batch produces 1,451 retail pounds, so your average cost is $6.89 per retail pound.
Mid-October inventory shows unsold meat from this batch:
- Ground beef: 320 lb.
- Ribeye steaks: 60 lb.
- Chuck roasts: 90 lb.
- Stew meat: 70 lb.
- Total on hand: 540 lb.
Your inventory valuation report multiplies the 540 lb. on hand by the batch’s average cost ($6.89/lb) to show $3,720 of meat inventory still on the shelf — useful for your balance sheet and to keep COGS accurate for the month.
So, why is this information useful? First, it’s a good way to make sure your pricing is achieving your target profit margin. If you’re selling ground beef at $8.99/lb, then your profit margin is only 23% — something you might not realize if you priced on instinct alone.
Additionally, by looking at your unsold inventory, you might choose to cut back on production and create new product bundles or discount offers to turn that inventory into cash. It also helps you keep track of how seasonal changes or cost increases (e.g. feed cost increases) affect your COGS, so you can make more strategic price adjustments.
3. Stockout Lists
Between processing meat for sale, packaging it, marketing your store, and serving customers, it can be shockingly easy to lose track of your stock levels. This is especially true if you’re tracking stock levels on a spreadsheet or by physically checking your storeroom. But if customers order from you only to find that items are out of stock, they’ll be mildly annoyed at best and go somewhere else at worst.
A stockout report helps you proactively keep your inventory well-stocked, so you can avoid these problems altogether.
What it is: A stockout report lists all items that are running low in your inventory. Different thresholds can be set based on your production time.
Why it’s helpful: This report reduces the need to physically check your stock levels, effectively warning you about what’s running low before it becomes a problem.
An example: You’ve spent the first half of the day in the farm store, selling to customers. In the afternoon, you’ve reserved some time to prepare pickup orders that are placed through your website.
When you pull up your system, you get a low-stock notification for chicken thigh, signaling that you need to prep more before the store opens tomorrow. It’s important to note that you might not have realized your chicken thigh was running low just by sight alone.
Even though your stock of chicken thighs doesn’t look depleted, a few large orders came through online and automatically subtracted those pending orders from your available inventory. Without the low-stock notification, you might be caught off guard with a stockout or only realize after preparing the online orders, leaving you with extra work at the end of the day.
Doing a daily check of your stockout list helps you proactively keep items stocked without waiting for them to run out first.
4. Income Analysis
Many farmers look at their total sales as a measure of their business success, but total sales volume doesn’t tell the whole story. You need to know which specific products or product categories contribute the most to your profits, so you can improve your selection and spend money on the items your customers love the most.
An income analysis report gives you a more detailed look at your financial performance.
What it is: An income analysis report allows you to analyze your revenue based on major product categories (e.g. beef, chicken, dairy) and by sales channel (e.g. in store or online).
Why it’s helpful: Breaking down your revenue sources by product category helps you understand which types of products are most popular with customers and gives you a chance to find areas to expand or cut back on production. It can also be shared with accounting software like QuickBooks for financial reconciliation.
An example: Imagine you are running a direct-to-consumer (DTC) farm store website that sells a variety of beef, pork, chicken, and fish. Within those four major categories, there’s a ton of variation (e.g. different cuts, different types of fish, product bundles, etc.).
By assigning each of your front-end items (i.e. the products customers browse) a counting class ID, you can then break down your income by category within a given time period. Looking at your December sales, you see that beef products made up 75% of your total income compared to only 60% the month before.
This helps you understand how to plan production by getting a sense for how demand fluctuates throughout the year. You can further filter down to see which beef products accounted for the highest sales, so you know which items to advertise.
Related Read: Financial Planning for Farm Stores: 7 Resources & Tools
5. Customer Reports
Marketing your farm store is a must for bringing in new customers and, more importantly, getting those people to order from you again. Marketing takes time to master, but that’s hard to do if you can’t measure what’s working and what isn’t.
First-time customer reports and reorder rates are a great way to measure your marketing effectiveness.
What it is: A first-time customer report filters down your online sales by people who have only ordered with you one time over a given time period. You can also filter customer data by people who have ordered multiple times to understand how often they reorder.
Why it’s useful: Customer reports are useful for many reasons. First, look at the volume of new account signups as an indicator of marketing success. You can also see what they order to get a sense for what piques their interest, which you can use in your marketing.
Similarly, reorder rate tells you how satisfied your customers are and what kind of products keep them coming back.
An example: You’ve launched a website for online farm store sales, and decide to pay for social media ads to drive traffic. Once your ad is live, you compare the number of first-time buyers in previous months against the month that you ran the ad. Seeing a jump in account signups shows that your marketing was worth the money and is leading to conversions.
On the flip side, you might see that the number of website visitors increased, but didn’t equate to account signups and sales. This could be an indicator that your website didn’t meet expectations, the messaging of your ad wasn’t effective, or that you should consider creating some sort of deal for first-time orders to boost conversions.
Or, imagine you notice that the average reorder rate for returning customers is about once every three months. So, you start sending out discounts and offers to your existing customers to entice them to order more frequently.
Improve Your Farm Store Sales With a Solution Built by Farmers
Many farmers are looking to break into DTC sales, but find that generic e-commerce tools don’t have the functionality they need to sell catch weight items, or they require a lot of IT experience or workarounds to deliver a convenient shopping experience.
GrazeCart was specifically built by farmers to simplify the way fresh food is sold online. GrazeCart makes it easy to sell a wide variety of catch weight products, create product variants and bundles, or even set up subscription-based sales.
Whether you’re brand new to DTC sales or looking to grow your business, we have a pricing plan that fits your budget. Try our free pricing tool today to learn more.
