How to read your reports and dashboard

Reports are only useful if you know which number to act on. Opraly’s reporting & analytics pulls every booking, payment and tip into one place — the trick is reading them in the right order. This guide walks you through the core metrics, what each one is telling you, and the decision it should drive.

Start with the dashboard, then drill down

Your dashboard is the headline view: today’s bookings, sales so far, and the health metrics that matter most. Treat it as a glance, then open a specific report when something looks off. A good rhythm:

Daily — check sales and today’s schedule.
Weekly — review no-show rate and utilization.
Monthly — look at retention and revenue per staff member.

Note: what you can see depends on your role. Owners and managers see full financials; providers see their own figures. To change who sees what, visit staff roles & permissions.

Utilization: are you booked enough?

Utilization is the share of your available hours that are actually booked. It answers “do I have too much capacity, or not enough?”

Low utilization — open up online booking, run a package, or trim hours that never fill.
High utilization — you may be turning customers away; consider adding staff, a chair, or a class.
Lumpy utilization — busy Saturdays, dead Tuesdays — is a pricing and promotion signal, not a staffing one.

Read it per provider too: it shows you who has room to take more work and who is at capacity.

No-show rate: are you protecting the calendar?

Your no-show rate is the percentage of bookings that never showed. It is the single clearest measure of whether your policies are working.

Trending up? Tighten deposits, no-show fees and reminders — see cutting no-shows with deposits and card-on-file.
Trending down after you added card-on-file? That is the policy paying for itself.

Watch it week over week, not day to day — single days are too noisy to act on.

Sales and tips: where the money comes from

The sales report breaks revenue down so you can see what is actually driving it:

Revenue by service — which treatments and bundles carry the business.
Revenue by staff member — who is selling, with tips attributed correctly.
Revenue by product type — memberships, packages and gift cards versus one-off visits.

If recurring revenue from memberships and packages is growing as a share of sales, your cash flow is getting more predictable — exactly what you want.

Retention: are customers coming back?

Retention measures repeat visits over time. New customers are expensive; returning ones are your margin.

A healthy rebooking rate means your experience and reminders are working.
A dip is an early warning — often a service-quality or follow-up problem worth catching before it shows up in sales.

Reading reports across locations

If you run more than one site, every report can be viewed per location or rolled up across the business. Compare sites to find what your top performer does differently, then standardise it. The full walkthrough is in managing multiple locations in one account.

A quick reference

Metric	The question it answers	The action it suggests
Utilization	Too much or too little capacity?	Adjust hours, staff, promotion
No-show rate	Are policies protecting the calendar?	Tune deposits, fees, reminders
Sales	What is driving revenue?	Double down on top services
Tips	Who is delivering great service?	Recognise and coach the team
Retention	Are customers coming back?	Fix follow-up before it costs you

How the metrics connect

The real value shows up when you read these numbers together, not in isolation. A few patterns to watch for:

High utilization + rising no-show rate — you are booked solid but losing slots you can’t refill. Tighten policy first; adding capacity won’t help if a chunk of it evaporates each week.
Strong sales + weak retention — you’re winning new customers but not keeping them. The fix is follow-up, not more marketing spend.
Low utilization + healthy retention — your existing customers love you, but not enough people are finding you. Open up online booking and push gift cards to bring new faces in.

Reading two metrics against each other almost always points to a clearer action than staring at either one alone.

Set up the reports you’ll actually use

You don’t need every chart — you need the three or four that change a decision. A simple starting set for most businesses:

Sales by service — to see what’s carrying the business and what to promote.
Utilization by provider — to balance the schedule and spot who can take more.
No-show rate over time — to know whether your deposit and reminder policy is working.
Retention — to catch a drop before it reaches your sales line.

Filter each by date range and, if you run more than one site, by location. Everything else is there when you need to dig, but these four are the ones worth a regular look.

Turn the numbers into a habit

The businesses that grow are not the ones with the most data — they are the ones who look at the same few numbers on a regular cadence and act on them. Pick your weekly metric (usually utilization or no-show rate), put a recurring 15 minutes on the calendar, and let the trend tell you what to change next.

Reporting works the same across every vertical, so whether you read it for a salon, a fitness studio or a restaurant, the questions are the same — and the answers are right there.

Want to see your real numbers? Start free and your dashboard starts filling in from your first booking.