How to keep track of your business's sales (free template included)

Almost every new business knows how much it sold. Very few know how much they made. The gap between those two numbers is exactly what tells you whether the business is doing well, and the only way to see it is to track your sales: write each one down with what it cost you, and add them up at the end of the day and the month.

You don't need an expensive system or an accounting background. You need to write down the same things, the same way, in the same place, every time. Here's how, from a notebook all the way to an app, plus a free spreadsheet template to start today.

Why track your sales

Say you sold $20,000 this month. Sounds good. But if that stock cost you $13,000, you paid $1,500 in shipping and $800 for your market stall, what you really made was $4,700. If you don't log your sales with their cost, all you see is the $20,000, and you make decisions based on a number that isn't really yours.

Tracking sales lets you answer three questions that are otherwise guesswork:

• How much did I really make? Not what went into the till, but what's left after paying for the stock and the expenses.
• What should I be selling more of? Your best seller isn't always the one that leaves you the most.
• What do I need to restock? If you know how much of each item you sell, you know what's going to run out before it does.

What to record for every sale

Each sale is one row. If you always record these details, everything else can be worked out later:

• The date. Without it you can't tell one day, or one month, from another.
• What you sold. The product and, if it applies, the size, color or variant.
• How many.
• The price. The price you actually sold at, not the list price.
• The discount, if there was one.
• How you were paid. Cash, card or transfer. It's what lets you reconcile the till with the bank.
• What it cost you. The detail almost nobody writes down, and the one that tells you how much you made.

Three ways to do it: notebook, spreadsheet or app

There's no single right way for everyone. It depends on how much you sell, whether you work alone or with someone, and where you are when you sell. Here's how they compare:

A notebook works for the first month, while you're selling little. The problem is it doesn't add up: at the end of every month you're back with the calculator redoing all the math, and one forgotten row is enough to throw it off.

Excel or Google Sheets is the natural next step. It does the sums, calculates your profit and can keep your inventory if the sheet is well built. That's why we put together a ready-to-use template.

An app makes sense once you sell every day, have more than a few dozen products, or someone else helps you sell. The sale is recorded the moment it happens, from your phone, and your inventory goes down on its own.

Tracking sales in a spreadsheet, step by step

A good sales spreadsheet isn't one table: it's several tabs that talk to each other. That's how our template is built, and it's how you should build yours if you're starting from scratch:

• Products. One row for each thing you sell, with its price, its cost and how many you have. If you sell sizes or colors, one row for each.
• Sales. One row per sale, with the details above. Price and cost are pulled in automatically from «Products», so you never type them twice.
• Purchases. The stock you buy. It gets added to what you have on hand.
• Expenses. Everything that isn't stock: shipping, packaging, advertising, the place where you sell.
• Summary. Pick the month and see how much you sold, how much you made after expenses and what you need to restock.

One tip that saves a lot of mistakes: on the sales tab, pick the product from a drop-down list instead of typing it. «Black T-shirt», «black t-shirt» and «Black T-Shirt» are the same product to you but three different ones to Excel, and your inventory stops adding up without you knowing why.

Daily sales tracking: how to close out the day

Closing out the day is when you check that what you logged matches what you have. It takes five minutes and keeps today's mistake from turning into a month-end mystery:

• Add up the day's cash sales and count the money. They should match, once you take out the change you started with.
• Add up the card sales and compare them with your card reader's report.
• Check the transfers in your bank account.
• If something doesn't match, track it down today. Tomorrow you won't remember what happened.

If you sell from a catalog, at markets or on social media

When you sell outside a shop, sales come in from everywhere: an order on WhatsApp, a sale at Saturday's market, a message on Instagram. The rule is the same, but two things deserve extra care:

• Record the sale when it's paid, not when it's ordered. An order that hasn't been paid isn't a sale yet.
• Record your selling costs. The market stall, gas for deliveries, the bags. They're small, which is exactly why they get forgotten, and together they can eat a good chunk of your profit.

Five common mistakes

• Writing down the price but not the cost. You know how much you sold but never how much you made.
• Leaving it for later. Sales logged from memory at the end of the week are always fewer than the ones that happened.
• Mixing business money with your own. If you pay for groceries out of the till, log it as a withdrawal; don't let it vanish.
• Never counting your inventory. Every so often, count what you have and compare it with what your sheet says.
• Forgetting the small costs. Shipping, card fees, packaging. They're what turn a good sale into a bad one.

When it makes sense to switch to an app

The template will serve you for a long time. It's worth taking the next step when you start forgetting to log sales because you don't have the computer with you, when someone else is helping you sell, or when your inventory no longer fits in your head.

Arca does what the template does, on its own: you record each sale with the barcode scanner and stock goes down with every one. All from your browser, with reports on how much you're making. And you don't start from zero: upload your products tab and your whole catalog comes in.

Read: how to sell at a market and keep track of your sales →

See how Arca works if you're just starting out →

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