Know your bestsellers.
And your dead weight.

A good stock report goes well beyond “how many do I have left”. It shows, per product: units sold, revenue, margin (when you record a cost price), current stock on hand, and low-stock flags. Together these answer the questions that drive real inventory decisions — which lines earn their shelf space, which quietly lose money, and which are about to sell out. It's the difference between managing stock on gut feel and managing it on evidence.

These three numbers tell very different stories, and reading them together is where the insight lives. A product can sell in high units but generate little margin — busy but barely profitable. Another might sell rarely yet carry a fat margin, making it worth keeping despite low volume. Revenue alone flatters cheap, high-turnover lines and hides the quiet earners. Always look at all three: volume tells you what's popular, margin tells you what's profitable, and the gap between them tells you where to focus.

Dead stock — items that haven't sold in months — is cash sitting on a shelf, plus the storage and opportunity cost of holding it. A stock report surfaces slow movers so you can act: discount to clear, bundle with popular items, or simply stop reordering. Clearing dead stock releases working capital you can put into the products that actually sell. Many product businesses discover that a small share of their catalogue drives most of their profit, and a long tail earns almost nothing.

The flip side of dead stock is the stockout — running out of a bestseller right when customers want it, and losing the sale (and sometimes the customer) to a competitor. Low-stock warnings turn reordering from a reactive scramble into a planned decision: you see what's running low while there's still time to restock. Knowing your true margin on each line also means you reorder with confidence, backing the products that pay rather than the ones that just look busy.

Margin is only meaningful if the cost behind it is right. Record a cost price against each product and the report shows the true margin per line, after what you paid to source it. And if you sell in more than one currency, money figures (revenue, margin) are shown per currency so they're never blended into a meaningless total, while unit counts add up across every sale — giving you both an accurate money view and a true volume view. That's how a stock report earns its keep: numbers you can actually base an order on.