Retail Math: Understanding the Numbers that Drive Success
What you'll learn
- Interpret margin & markup data and understand how to improve KPI's
- Identify the components of a price
- Markdown calculations, types, benefits and risks
- Analyze the open-to-buy calculation
- Understand inventory turns
- Apply learnings to ask the right questions when presented with merchandising data
- Shrink calculations and concepts
- Break-even analysis
- Introduction to the income statement
- Comparative sales and SG&A expense ratios
- Operations efficiency metrics
- Sales per square foot and sales per employee
- How to measure customer perception and behavior
Requirements
- No retail experience or math expertise required, just bring a desire to learn
Description
Retail is an exciting, challenging, and fast-paced career choice. Merchandising is the engine that drives the business. The ability to understand merchandising & buying metrics is essential to success and those metrics are covered in great detail here. This course goes a step further, taking a cross-functional view including store operations, finance, accounting, and loss prevention to explore strategic concepts and the big picture of how the metrics tell a story. The instructor is known for using well-paced lectures and clear illustrations featuring examples and lessons learned over a decade in leadership roles. The course is ideal for those who are new to retail or who are experienced but never received an in-depth explanation of the key metrics and strategic concepts. Additionally this is great knowledge for any recruiter who needs to understand retail terminology in order to effectively interview candidates.
The high level topics include:
Merchandising formulas and concepts
Pricing strategies explained
Loss prevention formulas and concepts
Finance & accounting retail relevant topics
Store operations key metrics
Course includes downloadable materials, such as visual illustrations of key concepts, a glossary and a 1-page formula cheat sheet.
What you’ll learn:
Interpreting margin & markup data and how to improve the related KPI's
Identify the components of a price
Markdown calculations, types, benefits and risks
Analyze the open to buy calculation
Understand inventory turns
Apply learnings to ask the right questions when presented with merchandising data
Shrink calculations and concepts
Break-even analysis
Introduction to an income statement
Comp sales & SG&A expense ratios
Operations efficiency metrics including sales per employee
How to measure customer perception & behavior
Who this course is for:
- Buyers, assistant buyers, planning & allocations analysts
- Store operations, loss prevention, retail finance & accounting, inventory control professionals
- HR recruiters who want to learn frequently used acronyms and terminology
- Students who are interested in a retail career but want to know more about the inner workings
- IT technologists who are responsible for designing and maintaining retail software such as POS, merchandising and pricing systems
- Project managers who are inexperienced in retail concepts
- Internal and external auditors who want to understand the metrics of retail
- Any retail professional who wants a broader understanding of KPI's from a cross-functional perspective
Instructor
- 4.7 Instructor Rating
- 240 Reviews
- 945 Students
- 6 Courses
Rich began his career as a New York state licensed CPA with PriceWaterhouseCoopers, LLC ("PwC"). He provided business assurance and consulting services to some of the world's largest telecommunications and retail companies. Eventually he moved into Information Technology, earning an MBA in Information Systems, a Masters' Certificate in software design and PMP certification.
In a 30 year career, Rich held various roles of increasing responsibility in Accounting, Finance, Business Analysis, Software Design, Quality Assurance, Development, Support and Project Management in the retail and financial services industries. He led audits of several Fortune 500 companies and had responsibility for all point-of-sale, payments and supply chain software for two of the largest retailers in the United States. Rich has been involved in hundreds of software implementations, leading large teams of internal and external resources through complex environments to achieve strategic results. One such project was featured in Chain Store Age in October of 2022.