Demo: Financial Analytics and Insights

In this Feature Friday demo I show how WholeCell's analytics pages provide detailed tables and graphs of your business insights and financial accounting. Watch the recording to learn more.

Transcript:

So thanks everyone for joining the webinar today. This is our feature Friday series that I am doing today on a Thursday to make some time for other stuff. So my name is Brennan, I'm one of the co-founders of WholeCell. And I like to do these weekly demos to show you how certain features in WholeCell work, give you a little preview of them and then get in and show you a quick demo as well. So today we're talking about WholeCell's analytics feature.

For anybody that's joining the webinar and does not know what WholeCell is or has not seen it before, WholeCell is a serialized inventory management system, it is built specifically for folks that buy and sell used phones. It generally can be used for used electronics. You can certainly keep track of tablets, wearable devices and you can keep track of laptops, but our main focus at the core of WholeCell is buying and selling phones because used phones have so many different things that could be wrong with them, WholeCell specifically does a great job of tracking all of those various conditions that used devices can be in. And one of the things that if you've been watching kind of our journey in building WholeCell out as a piece of software is lately we've been building a lot of e-commerce integrations to allow you to sync your used device inventory to the various channels that you sell on. As of today we support direct integrations with Swappa, the various marketplaces that they have, and with Back Market, and we've got an eBay integration that's coming out pretty soon as well. So we want to support all the different places that you sell your used device inventory and do things that other inventory systems can't.

And one of those things is actually scanning specific IMEIs of devices on the orders that you fulfill, whether they're e-commerce orders or wholesale orders or through any other channel. The great thing about WholeCell is that you have all of your inventory in one platform as in a serialized nature with the IMEIs or serial numbers of each device, and when they're going out on orders you're actually attributing the specific IMEIs that are going out to your customers. And if you're ever getting returns back, your customers have to tell you what IMEIs they're sending back, and so WholeCell was built around that concept and that's what makes it unique to other inventory platforms.

And then lastly the thing that WholeCell does a great job of is just if you're using spreadsheets or some other kind of manual inventory system now, it really keeps your team on the same page. And folks that are operating on spreadsheets or on sheets of paper there's a lot of communication that is required with those systems if you've got multiple people on a team, and WholeCell is one app that manages all of your inventory information, so cuts way back on the communication that's required. So that is WholeCell.

And what are WholeCell analytics? So analytics is like one of my favorite parts of WholeCell and so I'm excited to show you guys about it today. It's basically a combination of the business insights features that you get from something like power BI or other business insights tools, and a combination of that and gross accounting understanding. So the thing I like about it is you're going to need to use Quickbooks or Xero or some accounting platform to keep track of your whole business, of the money that you're spending on, your rent and your employees and your chairs in your office and your tables and stuff. But what those systems don't give you a great understanding of is your gross financials - you buy a phone for 100 bucks, you sell it for 150, you want to know that you made $50 on a $150 sale, you made a 33% margin and you made $50, you made $50 in gross profit. And so WholeCell does a really, really good job of focusing on those gross financials that are harder to see with a traditional accounting system.

And then we also have some tools that I'll show you over the course of this that are really great for making better decisions about what products you're buying, who you're buying from or selling to and those things. So I should say our analytics are based on committed inventory as well, so what committed inventory is like when you create an order in WholeCell and you attribute specific items that you bought, a specific IMEI or serial number device to an order, that's how we calculate your analytics so that they're not just kind of average analytics that are based on what was your average price paid for a certain product which is how most inventory systems work.

WholeCell, you know we're tracking your individual items and so maybe you bought 10 iPhone 7s from one supplier at one price and then you bought 10 more from another supplier at a different price, we're not just taking an average of those prices. If you're selling those items that you bought from supplier one on an order, those are the items we're looking at the purchase price of to calculate your analytics. So it's important to note in WholeCell analytics are based on inventory that is the specific committed inventory that's on an order.

And then the neat things are the channels that you can track your financials across are your products, so which models of iPhone or which models of phone, tablet or whatever you're selling are performing, how are they performing. And you can even break that out into what carrier are they on, are the AT&T iPhones that you're selling performing better than the unlocked iPhones or what have. You can look at your customers and vendors and basically get a leader board of which customers are making you the most money and which are making you the least. And vendors as well, I think this is something that's often overlooked as most inventory systems look at you're just buying inventory, it doesn't really matter who you're buying them from, but in the marketplace of used things you actually sometimes get a much better deal on stuff from some vendor compared to another or that vendor requires a lot of returns and stuff like that, so you can start to get a sense of over your lifetime of working with a customer or vendor how are they performing and what are they contributing to your business.

And then we just kind of have a standard perspective of how much money did you make on this purchase order or this sales order, which I think is also kind of unique. Because of our WholeCell's perspective on serialized inventory we can tell you how well you actually did on the phones that you bought in one purchase order or sold on one sales order. So that's an overview of analytics.

And I'll drop down through kind of some screenshots and some specifics of the different analytics tabs that we have in WholeCell. The main core thing when you click on analytics from your WholeCell sidebar is financial analytics. And like I was saying, this is kind of a blend of business insights and gross accounting. So what I've got here as the first bullet is that the time frame is adjustable. In that screenshot you can see up at the top we've got a date selector, and so you can select different time frames and look at kind of the core financials of your business in different time frames. So here we see the revenue, the gross profit, the gross margin, the profit per device which is sometimes really helpful to see. And you've got a visual graph of that. And you have a leaderboard that shows you a couple of different selections, and I'll show that in the demo today. But basically, the top 10 feature allows you to kind of compare how well are my product ... what's my highest product by revenue, which is in that screenshot, or you could do highest product by gross profit or by margin, or you can do customer, etcetera.

So it really allows you with just a couple clicks after you've gotten a bunch of information and run your business on WholeCell for a while to see how is your business performing and functioning in terms of the inventory, and specifically about the inventory that you're selling. So that's financial analytics.

Inventory analytics is about the inventory that you have in your business now, and this is to solve a lot of ... especially used device businesses you're cycling through inventory so quickly that you sometimes just need to grab a current value of inventory to update your balance sheet on your primary accounting system. So maybe you're using Quickbooks or something like that and your accounts are going to say, "Hey, at the end of the month what is your current inventory value?" This page in WholeCell, our inventory analytics page, allows you to go through all the different statuses of inventory in your business and see just a total ... a complete view of what is your paid value of that inventory, what do you have it listed for, how many devices is it and how old is the average ... what's the average age of the devices in the business? And then you get to go through them and see which models they are and what do you need to focus on selling. So you can get current inventory value and you can separate that value out by status.

The third tab on the analytics page itself is the product analytics. And what's neat about product analytics is the time frame is adjustable, so you can go look at how a different product, maybe iPhone 6 has performed really well this year but last year or next year they're not going to perform as well, so you can hone in on different months or different years or whatever time frame you want. It really helps you in that sometimes you're selling through, customers are really interested in a particular item so you're selling a lot of it but maybe it's actually not performing as well as you think it is and it's helpful to be able to see what products were actual winners and which ones were losers in a time frame. And that should help you make better decisions about what products you go out and buy in the future, so which ones are losers?

And then the thing I love about this page that I'll show you in the demo is you can group this product analytics page with all these different items as specifically as you need. So like I was saying earlier, maybe at the core ... at the base level, we have, you can see in the screenshot Apple iPhone 6. That product performed really well, we made a ton of gross profit, we had a solid margin. But maybe you want to see a little bit more about it and find out, "Hey, did the AT&T models perform worse or better than the unlocked models? Or did the 64 gigabyte models, how did those compare to the 16 gigabytes?" So this allows you to break products apart or condense them as much as you want to see how they performed financially in the business.

And then customer and vendor analytics are really neat. So I think a lot of times you'll have a business especially in the used, again, in the used phone world you're buying from vendors and selling to customers that are not quite as traditional as a normal inventory system would have you think. It's a constant rat race where people are trying to sell for the highest price and buy for the lowest price. And so what you get from the customer and vendor analytics in WholeCell is you see an all-time leader board of your customers, how much revenue have you generated from them, how much gross profit and what was their gross margin over all the deals that you've done with them? And the same thing for the vendors that you're buying from.

And I think that this kind of helps, whenever a vendor comes to you and has a question or wants to propose a deal you can come look at this and see where they're sitting with you. And for a customer maybe a customer wants to do an RMA and you're considering should we keep this customer, should we let them go at this point, are they returning too much? This is a place where you can actually see how do they rank over your all-time business history, how do they rank compared to other customers so you can kind of see how valuable are they to you and what does their history look like.

And then the last two things I'm talking about are PO analytics, so purchase order analytics and sales order analytics. Those give you ... we've started a 30,000 foot view and now we're coming down into the specific deal, so a single purchase from a vendor or a single sale to a customer, and these are really helpful for WholeCell deals where you're selling a lot of inventory. On your purchase order analytics page we can see the gross profit that we're generating from the purchase order, that's really helpful to see, to just know if you did a big deal, if you bought a big auction or a big purchase from someone, how well did that actually fare at the end of the day? Because you're probably doing some kind of estimate, "This is what we're buying the devices for and we think we're going to make this much money." This is the analytics page that actually lets you know how much money you made.

I can't stress this, again, most inventory systems they've looked at an average price paid so it can get really mixed up, the devices that you bought from this auction versus that auction. What's great about purchase order analytics is you can see that specific auction, those devices, how much did you end up selling them for and what kind of profit and margin did you generate?

And then the last thing here that I think is kind of neat is a cash flow impact. So as you sell through your purchase order and all the inventory that you brought in on it, you can actually see how much money you've reclaimed from the items that you've sold. And so you have a sense of the second you buy your purchase order, say it's a hundred thousand dollars, it's a big one, you have a hundred thousand dollars out the door so it's negative 100 grand is your cash flow impact, but as you sell through the batch you've sold presumably the devices for more money than you paid for them and so that cash flow impact starts getting lower or higher and higher I should say, so closer and closer to zero. And eventually as you start making profit you surpass the zero mark. And so it's very helpful to see that as, of course, as you're selling through a purchase order. So those are the things in the analytics tab on every purchase order in WholeCell.

And then sales orders are pretty simple, it's kind of the thing that everybody is familiar with their tracking, their analytics on, but same thing - you get to see your gross profit, your gross margin and your total value of the committed inventory that you've added to a sales order.

So those are all the different forms of analytics in WholeCell. And now I'm going to give you guys a quick demo. I'm kind of just going to walk through the pages that I just showed you in the screenshots but with a little bit more interaction. And I'd love to open it up at this point for questions, if you've got a question feel free to toss it in the chat, I'll read the question out and get back to you as we go through.

So conveniently, I have got my tabs here of the things I want to show you in the same window. And I'll just check, can everybody see the window that I'm sharing right now? Cool. So this is the same as the financial analytics screenshot that you guys saw in my slide deck, but there's a little bit more interactivity here. So you can see all these special metrics. One of the cool things that's behind this is you've got your traditional gross profit graph, and I'll describe this a little bit, this top line is revenue, the bottom line is spend. And so your lines in between are your gross profit, right? So you've got how much did you spend on the phones or how much did you sell them for on the top and then how much do you spend under, and the in between, that integral, is how much money you made. And so I think that's really visually helpful to see month over month. And with this chart you can spread it out to month over month, year over year, day over day, week of week, etcetera.

But another thing that we have that's hiding behind here is margin by channel, which if you're selling on a bunch of different sales channels, if you're selling on different e-commerce platforms or you're selling e-commerce in WholeCell it's really neat to come in here and see which channels do I have that are performing better or worse compared to each other, and it helps you visualize those elements about the business.

The other piece of this page that I just absolutely love and I think hopefully people get a lot of value out of is this top 10. And so top 10 here you can see we've got it sorted as top products by revenue, and this is for I've got this set to a time frame in 2018 where we have a lot of data in our demo account. But you've got a ton of flexibility here, so you can say top products by revenue or gross profit or margin. So let's look at top product by gross profit. So all of a sudden we see the iPhone 6 was in 2018 an absolute winner by gross profit. We made way more than our second highest product in that category.

And then from choosing what products or what things to measure your top 10 on you have a wide array of things to use here. We're looking at products but you can do customers, vendors, channels or sales reps on top of that. So let's look at customers just for that same period by gross profit. So we actually see that products were really spread out from one to two in the top 10, but customers are actually not. We've got our highest customer we made 84, almost 85 grand in 2018, and then our second one we made 74 grand so they're actually pretty close.

What about if we look at vendors? So if we look at vendors it's actually a little more similar to the iPhone, to the product comparison, where this company on top, wireless addicts, we made a ton of money, almost ... over a quarter million dollars, $276,000 from. And then our second highest one we made $162,000. And then it drops off a cliff. So this is a really helpful way to go in. And if you do year in review studies in your business or you bring in the team and you try and look at how did we perform last year, these are super fast ways to look at that analytics data and get a sense of it.

I'll do a quick review of the inventory and products here. Oh, actually I have these in other tabs to show you guys. So inventory analytics is like I showed in the slide deck. What's neat about this is you go through and uncheck the different statuses and you actually see, so we've got a ton of value of inventory, tons of inventories in the our unavailable status. So you can kind of see the inventory values change and what inventory you've got across different statuses. And it helps you get a really clear perspective of what am I sitting on now, how much inventory do I have now. And we even have this I think a little known feature here when if you click on a summary you get a summary in text of all these different models, and if you set the list price for them in your WholeCell account the list pricing, and people like to use this for if they're selling on channels like if you're using Whatsapp or Facebook Marketplace and you're just posting text lists, this is a text list that you can come in and copy and then post on whatever channel you're using to sell. So that's our inventory side.

Our product analytics and insights is super neat as well. We were talking ... I was talking about the iPhone 6 during the slide deck, and let's just do that, let's filter down to the iPhone 6. So we've got that base model. And then let's play with the grouping, so let's look at variant really quickly. There are two variants of iPhone 6. And actually they perform pretty differently in this time period we're looking at. The A1586 had a 31% average margin and the A1549 had a 17% margin. Now that could be kind of confusing, maybe these are different carriers. So let's stick network in there as well. And we've got a huge split out with network. Let's actually reduce that, reduce variant just to reduce the number of possibilities. So just by network now we can see, whoa, our total revenue, and let's see where's total profit, so that's total gross profit, let's sort it by that.

The iPhone 6 unlocked had by far and away the highest gross profit for us in that time period. And then Verizon was second but, I mean, it falls off a cliff guys. Look at that. So basically, the 2018 was an unlocked iPhone 6 year for us and performed super well. And so that kind of gives you a sense that comparing margin here might not be as valuable because there's so much volume of sales in that top column and really the volume is not nearly as significant. We sold over 7,000 items in column one or, excuse me, row one, and the rows below were less than a hundred. So but, again, a really neat way to come in to do a year in review or a month in review of your business here.

Let's look at a purchase order. And same thing guys, this is a purchase order that you jump to the purchase order page and you look at the inventory. Right off the bat the default is to pull up the inventory tab. But you click on the analytics tab and you get a sense of how are you performing on that purchase order. Sales order is the same exact thing, it's in analytics tab far off to the right. You'll start on the details page. And I think on sales orders it's important again to say all of our analytics and WholeCell are based on committed inventory since we're basing our analytics on the actual items themselves. They have to be on an order otherwise they're not being considered.

So in WholeCell today you can add a bunch of like order items to an order but that's not actual inventory, and so you can kind of between ... you can even see here in the screenshot I have up that this iPhone 6 model we've got 699 on the order that we're showing to the customer, but so far we've only committed 199. So the analytics for this order are going to be based on those 199 not the fact that we're going to sell 199 total.

So same thing, pop over to the analytics tab, you can see the average age of the inventory, the margin, the growth, the profit. And I'll say it again, the metrics in WholeCell are always gross metrics because you're not at net profit, you haven't subtracted all the other costs of doing business here but they're all about gross.

And then the last one was that organizations, the customers and vendors, so seeing how your customers perform. You can organize it by gross profit or revenue. And I think what's kind of cool here is we have Daniel here on top, you can kind of get this view from the financial analytics page, in the top 10, but this gives you a fully expansive view of all the customers and vendors that you work with. But I love here seeing that right side by side that we did this all this gross profit which is really what matters off of Daniel Inc. But the second line down we actually did quite a bit more revenue and less gross profit, so our margin considerably is quite a bit different. We're able to generate a 41% margin on Daniel Inc but 24% on our second performer. So that's it for customers and it's the same thing for vendors on the other side. So you can see which customers are worth working with or not and which vendors are worth working with or not.

So that's about it guys. I'll wrap it up there in terms of the demo. That's everything that I wanted to show you, but please if you have any questions feel free to ask them now.

I'll pop back over here just to show you guys how the date selector works. So we don't have any data in our current demo account for this time period, but all we have to do is go back, go to January of 2018 and December of 2018. It's a custom range. And look how fast that comes up, so we really do generate and we can pull that data out really quickly for any time frame that you have.

So that's it guys. No questions makes it easy. Thanks so much for coming to our demo. Oh, I got a question from David. "For the most part you covered a lot. No questions from me." All right, sounds good, David. I hope everyone enjoyed the demo. Feel free to send us a question if you ever have a question. Let me pull up that last slide again. You can start a trial of WholeCell from this URL right here. And again, I can't stress enough, Mike and Harry and myself are always excited to help people use WholeCell better. So send a support question when you have one at any time and we'll get back to you as soon as we can. Thanks for the demo this week guys. See you next week.