Weekly business report from your till and accounts

Most shops, cafes and service businesses keep sales in the till or POS and costs in the accounting package. Each answers half the question of how the week went. Record-keeping guidance treats both as core records: the IRS lists cash register tapes and deposit information among the documents for gross receipts, and HMRC lists bank statements, sales invoices, till rolls and bank slips as types of proof. The owner who wants a weekly view ends up exporting both and merging them in a spreadsheet, which is tedious and easy to let slip.

You add the job and give it read access to your till or POS and to your accounting package. Organ builds both connections with read access; until they are in place the job waits, paused. A scheduled business analyst agent then runs every week. It totals sales from the till and costs from the accounts and sets both beside last week and the same week last year where the data exists. It ranks the products or services that moved most against each of those weeks, and notes anomalies such as a gap in till sales, an unpaid supplier bill or a cost line far above its usual level. Its department head reviews the report before it reaches you, and you approve, edit or skip it.

Imagine a cafe that connects its POS and its accounting package. The report shows sales up on last week and on the same week last year, costs broadly level, oat lattes as the top riser against last week and pastries as the top riser against last year. It also points out two hours of zero sales on Tuesday afternoon. The owner checks and finds the card reader had dropped offline, something that is easy to miss when nobody looks at the week as a whole. This cafe and all figures here are illustrative.

Keep the report short and the same shape each week, so changes stand out. Name the extra metrics you care about, such as average sale or staff cost as a share of sales, and leave the rest out. If last year's data lives in an older system, say so when you add the job, so the year-on-year column has something to read. For related weekly jobs, see the inventory low stock alert job for reordering and the overdue invoice follow-up job for late payers, both linked below.