Whether your retail business operates one location or a dozen, store audits are an effective way to monitor how you’re doing. From examining the effectiveness of your displays, keeping your inventory in check, ensuring your POS software is working effectively and verifying that inventory management tasks are completed on schedule, store audits offer deep insights into your retail business. 

And with advancements in modern technology, store audits have taken on a new role for retail businesses, offering more insights than ever before. But for retailers that are new to store audits, the task can seem daunting. 

 

Why Store Audits Are Important

As the retail market changes, so do your business processes. Store audits may seem like a dated way to track your operations, but as your sales channels grow and become more complex, it’s important to stay on top of the goings-on in your retail business.

The store audit is a vital component of retail operations. Even in Pakistan as retailers begin to implement omnichannel retail strategies and incorporate up-to-date POS systems, store experience has become more important than ever. And it’s down to field teams to make sure the customer experience is top notch.

Keeping enough inventory to meet your in-store needs and any of the other channels you’re currently supporting requires up-to-date, accurate stock numbers. Not having enough stock in store and not having shelves set and displayed properly can make for a poor shopping experience, and store audits are one way that you can ensure customers walk through the best possible display experience in your stores.

Store audits are also great opportunities to improve your business and develop your employees. By using the results of the audit for more than just monitoring numbers, employers can use the audit as a learning opportunity to work with their employees to better the business in general.

Understanding the reasoning helps employees be more aware of when they aren’t compliant with corporate policies and work harder to maintain your standards. The more education you invest in your people, the more value you’ll get out of employees and stores.

 

The Benefits of a Store Audit

What specifically do you gain by doing a store audit? Aside from teaching your employees more about the day-to-day of your company’s business, the following are some potential store audit outcomes:

• Identifying and solving inconsistencies in-store presentation, visual merchandising, and brand compliance
• Finding store-level problems, such as maintenance and operational issues
• Closing the loop on task management, ensuring previous tasks and actions have been completed
• Uncovering best practices to share with other areas/stores
• Creating and implementing new in-store processes and procedures
• Providing a framework to evaluate financial metrics, KPIs, and team performance
• Build better relationships with your most important asset: your store managers and associates
• Foster positive competition between your stores

 

Doing Your Own Retail Store Audit

1. Get Your Store Audit Scheduled

So, how can you complete an effective store audit for your retail business? Make sure you schedule enough time to complete the audit without disrupting the customer experience. The best time to complete audits is during slow times when you have enough staff to effectively finish the audit and still be able to maintain regular business.

You can also complete the audit while the store is closed, but keep in mind that would require scheduling extra resources outside of retail hours.

 

2. Determine Your Goals

Come up with a list of objectives before you start the audit — what you hope to accomplish as well as areas that you think will require extra attention. Are your in-store displays looking less than ideal? Be sure to set aside an appropriate time to analyze each display.

Don’t forget to include the exterior of your building in the audit as well. This is, after all, the first impression that your business makes on customers walking through the door — something as simple as a burnt-out light or overflowing garbage can could alter how someone views your brand.

 

3. Take Thorough Notes As You Go

As you go through the process of completing your audit, take comprehensive notes (or get the third-party vendor conducting your audit to do so). Also take pictures as you go, documenting the audit results, so you can compare before and after pictures of the fixes as they’re made.

 

4. Delegate Fixes to Staff

Once you’ve completed the audit, assign tasks to employees, contractors, or external agencies as soon as your resources and budget allow. Even if you can’t afford to make a change until next quarter, getting it scheduled and on the books ensures that nothing is missed or left to pile up until the next scheduled audit.

 

Store Audits: Planning for the Long Term

After each audit, you’ll want to implement any fixes or changes as soon as possible and check the status during your next store audit. Regular store audits are also a great way to track your business over time — so be sure to look at the progress after each quarter and year.

Audit checklists are just one source of data that you can use to capture long-term progress, so be sure to compare audit results with inventory checks, sales over time, and resource allocations to get a bigger picture of your retail business.