How to Carry Out Retail Audit Services UK

How do you carry out a Retail Audits UK and what should you expect from the results? An audit is basically just a means of checking, but that makes it all a little simplistic. In order to get the most out of your audits, you need to plan them properly and understand what they are going to get out of them. If you don’t know what you expect the results to be, you won’t know if you have achieved them.

Step 1: plan.

Regardless of whether you have a large store or a more modest one, you will need to decide what the extent of your audit will be? Is it just a limited stock-check or a store-wide evaluation of what you have? Are you going to review your store layout or carry out a full Planogram schematic to promote certain lines in the right places? All of these scenarios will require different levels of planning and input, so decide what you want to achieve first.

Step 2: Who will carry out the audit?

This does depend on the complexity of the task that you are carrying out and how much training the person(s) involved have. Auditing per se is something that ideally needs to be trained out, but if you are considering something as specialised as a retail audit or even planogamic consistency, then some training will be needed.

Step 3: Carry out the audit.

Select a date and carry out the audit under the parameters that you have set. Depending upon the scope of the work, this might take a couple of hours or even a whole day or longer. Audits usually start with a few questions which then extend as the investigation progresses. You may find that one question leads to three more, and stock checking processes have to be followed up to establish the procurement route and whether all procedures have been followed. If you are using the audit to establish the best positions for your stock, then you or your auditors are going to need specialist knowledge about how to achieve that. It also means that you are likely to need to close your store – or at least sections of it – while you move stock to its ideal locations.

Step 4: Create an audit report.

An audit will always have a specific outcome. There are likely to be actions and a follow-up audit to check that the changes have been done and present any other findings that have come to light during the audit process. The audit report will give you a pathway for future audits and will give you a baseline for future changes. If you are looking to establish if product lines are correctly aligned and positioned, you could also find that some lines are not moving at all, and you could actually benefit from replacing them with better selling lines.

Step 5: Establish validity of changes.

You may need to wait some time, but you should be able to see specific, positive, changes in your business, in terms of more stock moving and increased sales. If this isn’t the case, then you may need to organise a new plan and a follow-up audit at a later date to determine if the next round of changes is having the desired effect.

Carrying out a retail audit is one of the most powerful tools that you can use in retail sales and if you employ it to its fullest extent, it can not only increase sales, but save you money too. You could rationalize your product lines and position specific products in the places that they are going to benefit you the most.

That is the benefit of carrying out Compliance Audit Solutions.

At Inside Tracks in the UK, We have experienced professional auditors and researchers. We provide retail store compliance audit solutions for our clients business.