How To Turn 3 Reports Into a Buyer’s Dream: Inventory Value, Sales, and Product Stock

You already know the basics. The Sales report tells you how things are selling. The Product Stock report is where you go to find reorders and markdowns. The Inventory Value report tells you what your inventory is worth, at cost and at retail.

Three reports, three jobs. Simple enough.

But here’s the thing: used together, in the right order, these three reports stop being separate tools and start being a single buying system. One that tells you exactly what to reorder, what to mark down, which vendors deserve more of your budget, and which ones don’t. Below, we’ll walk through exactly how that works, using a real scenario a lot of boutique owners will recognize: too many candles, not enough dresses.

1. Start in the Inventory Value Report: Find Your Imbalance
2. Go to the Sales Report: Find Out Who Is Earning the Reorder
3. Go to the Product Stock Report: Find Your Reorders and Markdowns
4. Turn the Dead Stock Into Cash Flow

1. Start in the Inventory Value Report: Find Your Imbalance

It’s Monday morning, coffee in hand, and you open the Inventory Value report to get a pulse on where your money is currently sitting.

Two things jump out immediately:

• You’re carrying way too many days of inventory in candles. You’re overbought.
• You have less than 90 days of inventory in dresses. You’re underbought.

Pro Tip: Your best inventory usually sells first. By the time you’re running low, your customers have already purchased many of your top-selling pieces. That means you’re not only underbought—your remaining inventory may no longer reflect what your customers are looking for.

This report just did the hardest part of buying for you: it told you exactly where your cash is stuck, and where you’re leaving money on the table. Now you know your mission: buy more dresses, and do something about all these candles.

2. Go to the Sales Report: Find Out Who Is Earning the Reorder

Knowing what to buy more of isn’t the same as knowing who to buy it from. That’s where the Sales report comes in.

1. Open the Sales report
2. Filter by Vendor
3. Drill further into vendor performance specifically within the dress department

This tells you which vendor’s dresses are actually selling through, the one you want to lean into and reorder from. Look at your candle vendors the same way. If a vendor’s candles just aren’t moving no matter how you slice it, that’s a vendor whose candles simply aren’t appealing to your customers, and it’s a strong signal to stop buying candles from them going forward.

At this point, you’ve gone from “I have too many candles and not enough dresses” to “I know exactly which vendor deserves more of my dress budget, and which vendor I should stop ordering candles from.”

3. Go to the Product Stock Report: Find Your Reorders and Markdowns

Now it’s time to turn that vendor knowledge into action. This is where the Product Stock report earns its keep, because it’s built for exactly two decisions: what to reorder, and what to markdown.

For dresses (the reorder):

1. Open the Product Stock report
2. Filter by department (Dresses)
3. Look specifically at your best-performing vendor from step 2
4. Find their most popular styles
5. Order them ASAP, while they’re still selling

For candles (the markdown):

1. Filter the Product Stock report by department (Candles)
2. Sort so the items that haven’t sold in the longest time rise to the top
3. Before you do anything else, confirm the item still physically exists; it’s not uncommon for a stray candle to slip through the cracks and sit forgotten in a back room
4. Mark it down so it actually sells

Marking those candles down frees up cash, cash you can now put toward the dresses that are actually working for you.

4. Turn the Dead Stock Into Cash Flow

Sometimes a markdown isn’t enough. You’ve discounted the candle and it’s still not moving. At this point, the goal shifts from “sell it” to “get it off my floor.” You need the shelf space for new product more than you need the last few dollars from a candle that isn’t going anywhere.

This is where you get creative: offer the candle as a free gift with purchase over a certain spending threshold. It still leaves your shelves, just as a way to drive a bigger sale, and you free up both floor space and cash flow to reinvest in the department that’s actually bringing in revenue.

Conclusion

Run in isolation, these three reports each answer a narrow question. Run together, in this order- Inventory Value to spot the imbalance, Sales to find the vendor, Product Stock to execute the reorder and the markdown- they become a repeatable system for making smarter buying decisions every single week.

You don’t need an advanced data analytics background to buy like a pro. You just need to know which report to open next.

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