Use Ontraport’s spreadsheet-like reporting tool, sales reports, to dig deeply into your data.
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Sales reports
Course Instructor
- How to use the six reports in your account to get the specific sales information you need
- How to see your open orders, subscription sales, how much you’ve collected in shipping and taxes, and more
- How to customize these reports so they’re most helpful to you
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Transcript
With Sales reports, you can zoom-in on sales data, and get line by line details about everything.
This is a bit different than the kind of data the Dashboard is designed to display, which gives you more of a birds eye view of your business performance. The Dashboard is great for viewing top-line numbers, like total purchases made yesterday or sales over time.
But if you’re looking for a way to analyze your data even further, sales reports are your friend. They’re a fairly conventional spreadsheet-type reporting tool you can use to dive into the line-by-line data of your sales history.
I’ll first cover how sales reports work and how they relate to the rest of your Ontraport account. Then I’ll talk specifically about generating and making sense of these reports.
So before we get too far into sales reports, there are three major pieces of your sales data to understand:
1. Transactions
2. Products, and
3. Open orders and subscriptions.
Let’s dive deeper into each of these terms.
A Transaction happens when Ontraport attempts to charge a credit card for a sale. This can be a one-time purchase of a product or a bunch of products purchased at the same time. A transaction is the charging of the card, whether it was successful or declined — not the products involved in the transaction.
Products are, as you probably guessed, the things purchased in a transaction.
Then you have Open Orders, which come in two primary flavors: subscriptions and payment plans. These are standing orders for stuff that’s going to be purchased automatically in the future.
Now, on to sales reports.
All the sales reports I’m going to show you take basic purchase information and splice it up in a way that gives you unique insight into your sales data.
The first report we’ll look at is the “Product Sales Logs”, which is in the “Sales” tab in your menu bar.
This will give you a line-by-line history of all individual products sold in your Ontraport account. It includes basic information such as your product name, the contact who bought it, and so on.
You can customize this information to fit your needs. Just click the column icon in the upper right-hand corner. From there, you can click “Add New Column,” or click and drag the order of your columns around using the arrows. You may also delete columns by clicking the “X” button.
You can rearrange your collection to display things in whatever way is most helpful for you.
For instance, maybe you want to see the names of the contacts who bought your product in each line. Or maybe you just care about the actual transactions themselves and want to view the dollar amount spent on your stuff.
You can also group these collections — in other words, apply a view filter to the data you see.
Click “Add New Group” along the top bar. From here, you can add fields, conditions and values.
So let’s say you only want to see successful purchases made this month. You can do that with a group by choosing “Status” for your field, “Equal to” for your condition, and “Paid” for the value. And then set the purchase date to be “after” “the first day of this month”.
Now let’s talk about the “Transaction Logs.” You can get there by heading over the “Sales” tab again and clicking “Reports,” then “Transaction Log.”
The “Transaction Logs” look similar to the “Product Sales Logs.” But this report will be a historical look at every transaction made in your account. Remember that transactions are the attempt to charge a card — this is different from open orders and products.
Just like with the “Product Sales Logs,” I recommend that you customize your columns so you’re getting what you need out of this report.
This report displays transactional information, like transaction status and attempted and successful payments.
If a customer buys multiple products in the same transaction, each of those products would appear in the “Product Sales Logs” report. But only one transaction would appear in the “Transaction Logs.”
Moving on to your “Open Orders” report. This report shows you how many open orders you have, how much your customer’s next payment will be, when it’s scheduled, etc.
You can also edit, or delete or export open orders from this screen if you need to. Just tick the box for the order you want to modify, and click the “Actions” button. From there, you can choose what to do.
Next up, your “Sales” report shows you a list of all your sold products and some aggregate data about these products. Keep in mind that if you haven't sold at least one of a specific product, it won't show up here yet.
So, for example, if you sell a T-shirt and sunglasses, those would show up as separate line items in this report. You’ll be able to see various pieces of data about each product, like your “Average Unit Price.” You can see other details here too, like the quantity of products you've sold, amounts paid, refunded or voided, and so forth.
You could see how much total revenue has been made from T-shirts versus sunglasses and how much you gave back in refunds, for example.
Your “Subscription Sales” report is a list of your products that were sold as subscriptions. It functions similarly to the “Sales” report we just talked about.
But there is a key difference between “Open Orders” and this report. “Open Orders” shows you data about each individual open order. This report aggregates and totals the data about all open orders for a particular product.
Let’s say you have four current subscribers for your coaching membership site, each paying $10 a month. In the “Open Order” report, you’d see those as four different line items with information about each customer, and each of their payment dates might vary.
In this “Subscription Sales” report, you’d see one line item for your membership site and their $40/month fee would be totalled in the data.
If you sell subscription products or open orders, check out your “Subscriber Retention” report. It will give you info about how successful you are in retaining your client base.
The data includes things like the average number of days people subscribed to your product. It can also tell you your average value, which takes an average of all your open orders.
This report is really valuable if the core of your business is a subscription product, because this shows the true value of each customer. If they're paying for your product more than once, your product will be worth more than the initial payment amount! And this report helps you figure out just how much more it’s worth!
Your “Customer Value” report is similar to your “Subscriber Retention” report. But rather than totalling or averaging your data per product, this report shows you each customer’s overall value across all products. You’ll see each customer’s "Last month total,” ”All time total" and "Current Open Order Total" in each line.
For example, if Josephine bought three $200 tickets to your coaching workshops over the past two years, her value would be $600 overall.
Finally, you have your “Shipping Collected” and “Taxes Collected” reports. These are very simple and similar, and they show you data similar to the “Product Sales Logs.” The exception is that these two specifically focus on two categories of money — taxes and shipping.
With your “Shipping Collected” report, you won’t have to worry about doing a bunch of math to figure out how much you’ve collected in shipping. The total will be right there. Same for your “Taxes Collected” report when it comes time to balance the books and pay your taxes!
I know we moved quickly, but this deep dive should have given you an understanding of all the sales reporting tools at your disposal!
Once you’ve gotten a grasp on transactions, products and open orders, you’ll find that your sales reports are a great tool for keeping you profitable.
When you combine this super-detailed style of reporting with your dashboard metrics, you’ll get a 360 degree view of your business performance.
This is a bit different than the kind of data the Dashboard is designed to display, which gives you more of a birds eye view of your business performance. The Dashboard is great for viewing top-line numbers, like total purchases made yesterday or sales over time.
But if you’re looking for a way to analyze your data even further, sales reports are your friend. They’re a fairly conventional spreadsheet-type reporting tool you can use to dive into the line-by-line data of your sales history.
I’ll first cover how sales reports work and how they relate to the rest of your Ontraport account. Then I’ll talk specifically about generating and making sense of these reports.
So before we get too far into sales reports, there are three major pieces of your sales data to understand:
1. Transactions
2. Products, and
3. Open orders and subscriptions.
Let’s dive deeper into each of these terms.
A Transaction happens when Ontraport attempts to charge a credit card for a sale. This can be a one-time purchase of a product or a bunch of products purchased at the same time. A transaction is the charging of the card, whether it was successful or declined — not the products involved in the transaction.
Products are, as you probably guessed, the things purchased in a transaction.
Then you have Open Orders, which come in two primary flavors: subscriptions and payment plans. These are standing orders for stuff that’s going to be purchased automatically in the future.
Now, on to sales reports.
All the sales reports I’m going to show you take basic purchase information and splice it up in a way that gives you unique insight into your sales data.
The first report we’ll look at is the “Product Sales Logs”, which is in the “Sales” tab in your menu bar.
This will give you a line-by-line history of all individual products sold in your Ontraport account. It includes basic information such as your product name, the contact who bought it, and so on.
You can customize this information to fit your needs. Just click the column icon in the upper right-hand corner. From there, you can click “Add New Column,” or click and drag the order of your columns around using the arrows. You may also delete columns by clicking the “X” button.
You can rearrange your collection to display things in whatever way is most helpful for you.
For instance, maybe you want to see the names of the contacts who bought your product in each line. Or maybe you just care about the actual transactions themselves and want to view the dollar amount spent on your stuff.
You can also group these collections — in other words, apply a view filter to the data you see.
Click “Add New Group” along the top bar. From here, you can add fields, conditions and values.
So let’s say you only want to see successful purchases made this month. You can do that with a group by choosing “Status” for your field, “Equal to” for your condition, and “Paid” for the value. And then set the purchase date to be “after” “the first day of this month”.
Now let’s talk about the “Transaction Logs.” You can get there by heading over the “Sales” tab again and clicking “Reports,” then “Transaction Log.”
The “Transaction Logs” look similar to the “Product Sales Logs.” But this report will be a historical look at every transaction made in your account. Remember that transactions are the attempt to charge a card — this is different from open orders and products.
Just like with the “Product Sales Logs,” I recommend that you customize your columns so you’re getting what you need out of this report.
This report displays transactional information, like transaction status and attempted and successful payments.
If a customer buys multiple products in the same transaction, each of those products would appear in the “Product Sales Logs” report. But only one transaction would appear in the “Transaction Logs.”
Moving on to your “Open Orders” report. This report shows you how many open orders you have, how much your customer’s next payment will be, when it’s scheduled, etc.
You can also edit, or delete or export open orders from this screen if you need to. Just tick the box for the order you want to modify, and click the “Actions” button. From there, you can choose what to do.
Next up, your “Sales” report shows you a list of all your sold products and some aggregate data about these products. Keep in mind that if you haven't sold at least one of a specific product, it won't show up here yet.
So, for example, if you sell a T-shirt and sunglasses, those would show up as separate line items in this report. You’ll be able to see various pieces of data about each product, like your “Average Unit Price.” You can see other details here too, like the quantity of products you've sold, amounts paid, refunded or voided, and so forth.
You could see how much total revenue has been made from T-shirts versus sunglasses and how much you gave back in refunds, for example.
Your “Subscription Sales” report is a list of your products that were sold as subscriptions. It functions similarly to the “Sales” report we just talked about.
But there is a key difference between “Open Orders” and this report. “Open Orders” shows you data about each individual open order. This report aggregates and totals the data about all open orders for a particular product.
Let’s say you have four current subscribers for your coaching membership site, each paying $10 a month. In the “Open Order” report, you’d see those as four different line items with information about each customer, and each of their payment dates might vary.
In this “Subscription Sales” report, you’d see one line item for your membership site and their $40/month fee would be totalled in the data.
If you sell subscription products or open orders, check out your “Subscriber Retention” report. It will give you info about how successful you are in retaining your client base.
The data includes things like the average number of days people subscribed to your product. It can also tell you your average value, which takes an average of all your open orders.
This report is really valuable if the core of your business is a subscription product, because this shows the true value of each customer. If they're paying for your product more than once, your product will be worth more than the initial payment amount! And this report helps you figure out just how much more it’s worth!
Your “Customer Value” report is similar to your “Subscriber Retention” report. But rather than totalling or averaging your data per product, this report shows you each customer’s overall value across all products. You’ll see each customer’s "Last month total,” ”All time total" and "Current Open Order Total" in each line.
For example, if Josephine bought three $200 tickets to your coaching workshops over the past two years, her value would be $600 overall.
Finally, you have your “Shipping Collected” and “Taxes Collected” reports. These are very simple and similar, and they show you data similar to the “Product Sales Logs.” The exception is that these two specifically focus on two categories of money — taxes and shipping.
With your “Shipping Collected” report, you won’t have to worry about doing a bunch of math to figure out how much you’ve collected in shipping. The total will be right there. Same for your “Taxes Collected” report when it comes time to balance the books and pay your taxes!
I know we moved quickly, but this deep dive should have given you an understanding of all the sales reporting tools at your disposal!
Once you’ve gotten a grasp on transactions, products and open orders, you’ll find that your sales reports are a great tool for keeping you profitable.
When you combine this super-detailed style of reporting with your dashboard metrics, you’ll get a 360 degree view of your business performance.
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