Reports and Dashboards a Trading ERP Should Provide

Reports and dashboards do different jobs

A report is a detailed listing you open to answer a question, such as which customers owe money or how stock moved last month. A dashboard is a summary you glance at, showing a handful of measures and how they are changing. A trading ERP needs both, and both should draw on the same records, so a figure on the dashboard can be traced to a report and then to the documents behind it.

What every trading ERP should report

Whatever you sell, the reporting needs fall into a few areas. If an ERP cannot answer these, you will end up rebuilding them in spreadsheets.

• Sales: what was sold, to whom, and what is still to be collected
• Purchases: what was bought, from which suppliers, and what is still to be paid
• Stock: what you hold, where, what it is worth, what has moved and what has been sitting too long
• Finance: the trial balance, profit and loss, balance sheet and cash flow, built from the ledgers
• GST: the data behind your returns, with problems flagged before you file

What a sales manager should see

A sales manager needs to know whether the pipeline is moving and whether orders are turning into cash. TradeFlow’s sales dashboard shows sales this month, open quotations, open sales orders, pending deliveries, total receivables, overdue amount, average order value and quotation win rate, with charts for the sales trend, top customers and sales team performance. The sales report lists invoiced, received and outstanding amounts by customer for a chosen date range, and the CRM dashboard adds open pipeline value, open tickets and overdue follow-ups.

What wholesalers and distributors should monitor

Wholesalers and distributors watch volume and credit at the same time. The measures that matter most are pending deliveries, which show whether the warehouse is keeping up, and overdue amounts by customer, which show whether credit is under control. Add stock value and low-stock alerts on the inventory side, and total spend and overdue bills on the purchase side, and a small set of dashboards covers most of the week.

Inventory reports a distributor should have

Inventory reporting is where a distributor’s money is tied up, so it deserves the most attention. TradeFlow provides four stock reports.

• Stock levels: current quantity by product and warehouse
• Stock movement: every stock in and out, with its source document
• Stock aging: how long stock has been sitting, in age bands
• Stock valuation: quantity, average cost and total value for each product
• Alongside them, reorder alerts list products below their reorder level, and the expiry register lists batches nearing or past expiry

Finance reports and dashboards

The finance module reports from the ledgers. TradeFlow’s financial reports include the trial balance, profit and loss, balance sheet and cash flow, and the finance dashboard shows cash, bank, receivables, payables, net profit for the month, GST payable, pending approvals and TDS pending. These are the figures your CA will also want, so it helps that they come from the same postings as the operational documents.

What an owner or CEO dashboard should include

An owner needs a single page that answers whether the business is healthy today. TradeFlow’s executive dashboard shows sales and purchases for the month, cash position, open pipeline, receivables and inventory stock value. A good executive view stays short, because a long one stops being read, and every figure on it should link to the detail behind it.

The AI CEO Dashboard, explained plainly

TradeFlow also includes an AI CEO Dashboard. It is built from fixed rules applied to your own ERP data, not generated by an AI model, so the same data always gives the same result. The rules cover items such as cash position, the sales trend, customers to follow up, supplier payments due, stock-out risk, stock that has been sitting too long, customers close to their credit limit, batches nearing expiry and a customer health score. Treat it as a prompt for what to look at, not a decision-maker.

Exporting and sharing

Reports are most useful when they can leave the system. TradeFlow’s reports export to Excel, which suits sharing with a CA or building your own analysis. Documents such as invoices have their own printable views. If a vendor cannot export their reports, ask why.

Questions to ask when evaluating reports

Test reporting with your own questions, not the vendor’s sample screens.

• Can I see what each customer owes, and what is overdue, without building the report?
• Do stock, sales and finance figures agree with each other?
• Can I filter by date range and export the result?
• Which role sees which report, and can I limit access?
• Which reports are fixed, and which questions would need a spreadsheet anyway?

Where TradeFlow fits

TradeFlow is an ERP for Indian traders, wholesalers, distributors and dealers, with sales, purchase, stock and financial reports, module dashboards, and the AI CEO Dashboard described above. To see how reporting fits your business, book a demo and bring the five questions you ask your team every week.

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