Analysis and Reporting

Analysis

The information you pull out of your point-of-sale system is arguably the most important aspect of a software system. Let me qualify that statement a little more. What you do with the information you pull out of your system is one of the most important activities you will perform in your business.

While we cannot control what you do with the information you obtain in Phoenix, however, we can strive to give you a vast wealth of knowledge about what is happening in your business. Armed with this information, you can determine what course of action is needed, you can determine if an action is improving a situation or making it worse.

Phoenix is all about cause and effect. For example, if you start a new coupon to drive customers into the store, wouldn’t you want to know if your efforts were successful? Wouldn’t you want to know how many coupons were redeemed?

At the end of the day, it is important to look at your efforts and determine if what you are doing is in line with the results you desire. Getting feedback like this is what Phoenix is all about. Phoenix delivers the information you need to make crucial decisions.

While it would be impossible to describe or show you every bit of detail regarding the information you can pull out of Phoenix, we will brush over the highlights and give you a sense of what you can get out of Phoenix. You will get a glance at rental, merchandise, customer, employee, and financial analysis and reporting.

Rental

Rental Product Performance – This report will provide you condensed information about a rental title’s performance and can be viewed by day, week, month, or year.

What is interesting about this information is that Phoenix not only shows you the turns, the revenue for a period, it shows you the number of copies available, the number rented and the percentage out for the period. You can easily see when a copy begins to slow down (lose its legs) when the percentage out begins to drop. This is an indicator that you can begin selling off copies through your previously viewed system.

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Rental Weekly Performance – When looking at information in this report, you are peering into the performance of each title based on the number of weeks out since its street date and the information is grouped into a week format.

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Rental Type Performance – This information groups the title performance information by format, genre, or pricing category. For example, you could break down your game rental information by platform (Wii, Xbox360, Playstation 2), or look at just “new releases”, or separate out just your Blu-Ray format.

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Slow Renting Inventory – The information gathered here will pinpoint rental items that you could potentially sell off (they are collecting dust). The filtering process allows you to set:

• Revenue date range
• Days of the week to report upon 
• The minimum number of copies to qualify for the report
• Percentage of copies rented during the scope of the report

You can even limit the report to show you a specific number of rental items, say your slowest 25 titles.

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Rental Product Demographics – The information here focuses on the dollars spent in your business by your customer’s age brackets. You set the specific date range you want to view and select a format, genre, pricing category, or title.

Phoenix will provide you a statistical analysis of the demographic and will graph the information for you as well. It will become quite clear what age brackets are making you the most revenue in each area. Armed with this information you can adjust your product offerings to match a targeted age group.

Statistical Analysis

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Title Return On Investment (ROI) – Here is where the rubber meets the road in a sense. This area will show you exactly what each title has earned verses its cost – ROI. This information can be obtained directly through the product editor and can be output in a report format to view several items at once.

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Purchase Targeting – This tool gives you the ability to target a specific ROI for a title at a given number of weeks out, and then reports on how close you came to the target. The system will also identify how many copies of a product you should have purchased to reach your target.

For example, you may decide that your target is a 150% ROI on a product at 6 weeks out (from street date). The system goes to work and analyzes the data and indicates how close you came to this target and will show you an adjustment to the number of copies you purchased in a “Retro Order” field. For instance, it may show you that you needed 2 less copies of a title, or that you needed 1 more copy.

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Top 100 Performers – This area gives you the ability to extract your best renting items for any given period. Retailers have used this tool to identify the best 5 titles of a prior month and spotlight them in a special section in the store.

You can limit the number of titles to report on, the date range to report on, and whether to analyze the ROI, the number of turns, or by revenue.

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Merchandise

Inventory Turnover – The idea behind identifying your product turnover is to discover if you are stocking the right quantity of any given item. If you are always reordering the product, say every week, you may be running out and not fulfilling customer needs and you may be able to get a quantity break by ordering more of the product less often.

If you discover you have too much of an item on hand, you can order less of the item at each period and reduce the capital (expense) on items that move more slowly.

The system takes into consideration your restocking level and how many items you have sold during a given period (you define) and provides a percentage of turnover. For example if you have a stocking level of 50 of an item and you have sold 100, the turnover would be 200%. Meaning you sold twice as much as your stocking level.

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Product Sales Demographics – Like the rental product demographics described above, this area breaks down the age brackets of people purchasing merchandise in your business.

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Product Sales – This is your bread and butter report that will provide sales figures for your products over a given period. You will quickly see how many were sold and the revenue generated for that product.

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Reorder – The reorder system will alert you to products that have dropped below its reorder point and will indicate the quantity you need to order to reach your restocking level.

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Customers

Performance Report – This customer performance report provides you a list of your best customers based on the money they have spent in your store. Many retailers use this feature to create a mailing list of their best 5 or so customers each month and send them a special incentive. The thought is to keep your best customers coming back.

You can specify the time period and the number of customer in the result set. You can send the information out to a report or directly to mailing labels.

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Customer Targeting – This tool gives you the ability to narrow your marketing efforts down to clients that have purchased or rented a specific product over a given time frame. Several retailers use this tool to email or mail special promotions to clients that have purchased a similar product.

This not only targets customer that are more likely to purchase or rent the promoted item, but also lowers your marketing expense. Think of this tool as a surgeon that can pinpoint the customers that will produce the best results, rather than wasting money using the shotgun approach.

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Customer Drop Off – This is a valuable tool that will identify good revenue generating customers that have recently stopped or lowered their spending in your store. The system forms a baseline by looking back a number of months and averaging the clients spending habits. Then the system compares this average to a current period (last month or so) and compares the difference to a drop off percentage you have defined.

This tool has been used heavily to get good customers back into the store by generating a list to call from, a mailing list to send flyers, or export the information to a file to be used with a mailing house.

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Employees

Employee Performance – Phoenix gathers information from several areas of the software to report on an employee’s performance. This information gives you a broad look at each of your employees and will show you your stars and the ones that need improvement.

Many retailers use this as the first look at each employee when evaluating their performance. Naturally you can dig down further, but this is a good starting point. The information that is reported on is:

• Rental Items: Number of items rented for the specified date range.
  
• Number Invoices: Number of invoices completed for the specified date range.
  
• Rental Revenue: Total rental revenue for the specified date range.
  
• Merch Revenue: Total revenue for merchandise items sold for the specified date range.
  
• ADR Revenue: Total revenue collected from late fees for the specified data range.
  
• Invoice total: Total revenue generated from all invoices for the specified date range.
  
• # new release: Total number of new releases rented for the specified date range.
  
• Number Catalog: Total number of catalog movies rented for the specified date range. 
  
• # check ins: Total number of rental items checked in for the specified date range.
  
• Number packages: Total number of package priced items for the specified date range.
  
• # w/o merch: Total number of invoices without merchandise for the specified date range.
  
• # Inv. Passed: Total number of invoices where an employee failed to collect one or more ADR's from the customer.
  
• # ADR pass: Total number of ADR's that the employee did not collect for the specified date range.
  
• $ ADR pass: Total revenue for the uncollected late fees for the specified date range.
• Times Tardy: Number of times the employee clock in late for the specified date range. 
  
• Missed Shifts: Number of times the employee did not clock in for a shift for the specified date range.
  
• Hours worked: Total hours worked for the specified date range.
  
• Days worked: Total days worked for the specified date range.

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Average Ticket – This tool has been becoming more and more popular with retailers because they are looking to increase the average ticket in their store. With this information you can determine the average ticket by employee.

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Auditing – This is by far the most utilized tool that we have talked about thus far. This feature keeps track of the abnormal activities that go on in your business. The activities that are tracked are:

This single feature has saved retailers hundreds of thousands of dollars in internal theft. What has been surprising over the years is that the shrinkage is not isolated to clerks. Many retailers found their trusted manager taking them for a ride.

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Financial

Revenue History – This is the pulse of your business, the place you go to see the performance of your store (the big picture). From here you can select what period you want to view and which of the several reports you are interested in viewing.

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The first page of information is a summary of the transaction for the period you selected: rentals, late fees, sales, subscription sales, refunds, and so on. You will also see how the revenue breaks down by cash, check, visa, and so on.

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The next page of information contains a wealth of statistics including:

• Coupons used
• Manually priced items
• Customers added
• Average rentals per invoice
• Average ticket
• Hour-by-hour breakdown on invoices, revenue, rentals and check-ins

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The comparison figures will show you information about genres, pricing categories, format, merchandise departments, coupon redemption, and pricing type.

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You can get a listing of what rental items and products sold during the given period. You will see the item, quantity, pricing, and ROI of the items that sold.

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Another interesting report is to view the voided and edited transactions for the period.

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Revenue By Day – The daily sales information is condensed into one line and presented in a spreadsheet format. You will see:

• Rentals
• Late Fees (ADRs)
• Merchandise Sales
• Rental Product Sales

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Historical Comparisons – With this tool, you will compare the cash total, number of rentals, number of sales, number of check-ins, or the number of invoices against prior years.

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Coupon Performance – Here you will track the number of redemptions of a coupon over time. You will see the number you issued, how many have been redeemed, the percentage redeemed, and how much of a discount you have granted with the coupon.

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