4 Ways to Utilize Reporting For Your Multi-Location Self-Care Business

By mastering reporting, you can gain a wider and deeper understanding of every part of your business

Congratulations on opening your second (or third, or fourth, or…) location! Having more locations means opportunities for growth, but it also means having more to manage. It can be challenging to keep track of all the data streams.

Luckily, that’s what reports are designed to help with. Your beauty business software is likely chock full of tools you can use to cut through the noise, find what matters, and address it head-on. Here are some ways reporting can help you stay on top of every location in your growing empire.

Take a bird’s eye view

When you’re in the midst of running a business, it can be hard to take a step back and see the forest for the trees. Managing the minutiae is important, but so is taking stock of what you’ve already built. It’s not just about appreciating how far you’ve come (although that’s also valid), but about taking a hard look at what you can do better. Where does your business still have room to grow?

One great way to ensure you’re taking these big-picture looks is to build daily, weekly, or monthly summary reports into your schedule. These reports pull critical stats such as daily revenue, product sales, appointments booked, and no-show counts. Are these numbers trending in the right direction? If not, where are they falling short? Answering these questions can help you identify areas to improve.

Of course, when you’re operating multiple locations, each one will have its own strengths and weaknesses. To identify both, try breaking out your summary reports by location. That way you can isolate the variables and focus your efforts where they’re most likely to matter. This is where having customizable roll-up reporting becomes paramount. These reports consolidate data from various locations, providing a comprehensive overview while allowing for granular insights into each location's performance. 

Reconcile your locations

Gift cards, memberships, and other loyalty programs are a great way to keep clients coming back for more. But they can cause a mess when you have more than one location.

There’s no telling where clients will use their membership benefits or gift cards, and when they do it can create confusion about where the revenue is coming from or disappearing to. For example, you might see a jump in revenue at your flagship nail salon without a corresponding increase in the number of bookings or sales. What happened? Well, clients bought gift cards at one location, gave them to friends who lived closer to another location, and they spent it there.

Cross-location reconciliation reports can help keep these mixed-up numbers straight. They can show you how much money is waiting on client gift cards and which cards out there have unused balances. They can also highlight instances in which gift cards are used to pay for a service, taking confusion out of the equation.

Data around membership usage can answer similar questions, picking out transactions that resulted from a member redeeming a perk so that it doesn’t muddy your usual transactions.

Stay up on inventory

Here’s a lesson you likely learned running your first beauty business location: Managing inventory is hard. It requires constant attention and superhuman diligence to keep track of the supplies and products you have on hand, how quickly each one runs out, when it’s time to order more, how much to order, and on and on. Any mistakes along the line can lead to wasteful overstocking or revenue loss caused by selling out too soon. And when you’ve got three locations to watch? The challenge only grows.

Inventory reporting is critical to meeting that challenge. These reports typically start with a simple overview of your supplies and retail products. They can highlight what’s moving the fastest and project how quickly it’ll run out. That data allows you to order the right products in the right quantities at the right time.

Retail’s healthy profit margins help it pull more than its own weight in terms of revenue. To maximize those margins, reporting can help you find opportunities to raise prices on popular items without undercutting demand.

On the flip side, inventory reporting can show you slow sellers that may need a bit of a boost. That could mean a different price point, or it could mean pulling them from your offerings entirely and offloading the leftovers with a clearance sale. Whatever you replace them with has a chance to pick up the slack.

Raise the bar for employees

Your providers are the lifeblood of your business. They’re on the frontlines of client relationship building, and when they succeed, your business succeeds. Measuring that success unlocks several potential benefits. For one, it lets you reward the highest achievers, making them happier to do their jobs. That has the knock-on effect of inspiring other employees to work harder. Plus, when you know which employees are underperforming, you can make a proactive effort to support them through additional training, certifications, or mentoring.

When you expand to multiple locations, it becomes more important than ever to pay attention to employee performance. You may find certain locations doing more business or seeing more repeat clients. Only by digging deeper can you find out if that’s the result of external factors or stellar providers.

It may not be possible to directly quantify employee performance, but your reporting software can pull metrics that strongly correlate with that performance. The most obvious would be sheer speed — more bookings per day means more revenue — but that one data point doesn’t tell the whole story. Your reports can highlight the number of repeat bookings a provider lands and their average tip size. More repeat clients giving bigger tips likely means that the provider is crushing it on the regular. Reports help you create a more complete picture of how each member of your team is contributing to your overall success.

Whether you’re examining individual employee performance or taking a macro view of your business, reporting can help you tune into what matters most — and tune out what doesn’t. Master it, and you’ll set yourself up for success no matter how many locations you have.