Retail Store Audits: Best Practices, Checklists, Software, and More

Store audits allow retailers to keep an eye on the health of their businesses and learn how they’re performing. However, the administrative effort and time necessary to plan, execute, and follow up on audits often means weeks of sustained effort.

Regular store visits and audits will always be crucial to profitable business, but they don’t have to be time-consuming or labor-intensive. 

This article will provide insights on making your audits as efficient and impactful as possible, and how a retail audit software like GoAudits can help.

What is a Retail Audit: Meaning, Types, and Benefits

Retail audits, aka store visits, protect the brand reputation, by ensuring that every store operates according to internal guidelines, delivering the right experience for customers and staff.

Retail store visits allow the Headquarters (HQ) to evaluate how customers experience a store. This in turn enables management to make more informed decisions and adjust their retail plan.

Types of Audits in Retail

Store audits are typically categorized based on the specific area of retailing.

• Store compliance audits determine if in-store practices don’t meet company standards or external regulations. E.g., inattention to product expiration dates.
• Health and safety audits require auditors to check compliance with health and safety procedures to safeguard workers and customers.
• Promotion and merchandising audits ensure that goods are displayed per guidelines, the store is clean and well-presented, and promotional signage is correct.
• Loss prevention audits focus on policies and processes set in place to minimize theft, waste, and security breaches.
• Competitor audits help you understand how your competitors position themselves in the market, their best practices, and what it means for your retail chain.
• Mystery shopper audits collect data on how visitors interact with and evaluate the brand.

Benefits of Regular Store Audits

Why do brands conduct regular audits and store inspections? Some of the benefits include:

• Protecting Your Brand and Identifying Problems Early On

Ensure compliance with brand standards and policies, so that customers receive the intended brand experience consistently, regardless of the store they visit. Store visits also allow management to spot issues before the customers notice: maintenance work required, training gaps, process flaws, etc.

• Assessing the Effectiveness of Merchandising and Planograms

See the customer perspective: assess whether your store layouts are user-friendly and inspire customers to buy items on the shelves. Audits check store compliance with supplier and manufacturer contracts.

• Data-driven Decisions

Retail businesses that conduct regular audits can tap into up-to-date store data to make better decisions and enhance performance. Are there recurring issues across one or many stores? What training areas should be prioritized? Which new equipment to invest in?

• Sync Up Management and Store Teams

Retail audits allow a two-way exchange of information between headquarters and store teams. Store visit reports show store teams how they’re doing. Measurable scores allow them to see good results as well as improvement areas.

• Health and Safety

Audits ensure that legal requirements such as health and safety laws and standards are followed. These precautions ensure the safety and well-being of consumers, employees, and the overall brand reputation.

Retail Store Audit Process in Action: Start to Finish

Start by evaluating what you want to focus on – inventory, merchandising, compliance, employee performance, etc. Based on this, build a thorough audit checklist, covering each item to the T.

Next, schedule the audit at a time when you don’t interrupt the customer or burden the store teams; slow hours with enough staff would be ideal. If you are ready to schedule resources outside working hours, you can perform the audit when the store is closed. 

As they go on completing the audit, ask your auditors to take thorough notes. Introduce retail audit best practices like taking photos for better reporting and comparing before and after situations.

Once the audit is complete, delegate the fixes to the staff or contractors. Even if you are off the budget or need more resources to make changes instantly, schedule them for the future.

Common Challenges Retailers Face During Store Auditing

Many retail chains, supermarkets, and food outlets struggle with maintaining consistent quality standards across stores. This may be because their audit processes are time-consuming, lack structure, and impose an extra administrative burden on the teams.

Paper forms, spreadsheets, or shared documents are often still the preferred tools. This makes store auditing an arduous process. The auditors often create reports manually, which may lead to inconsistencies, data insufficiencies, and errors. Also, these reports lack photographic evidence and actionable insights for the stores.

Consider the store audit example of Leon Conditors. The team used to spend 70 hours per week inspecting ten stores before switching to the GoAudits auditing app.

Every store differs in its strengths and weaknesses. Thus, the area manager should have access to the previous audit reports to understand which domains they need to focus more on.

For instance, there is no point in spending hours auditing product displays when the store actually needs help with staff training.

Best Practices to Ensure an Effective Retailer Audit

Here are the top 5 retail audit tips we’ve seen successful businesses implement.

1. Define KPIs

Before you start the audit, establish its goal – what you want to achieve and what factors you need to assess. You might study competitors to understand how to position your brand in a particular domain, like safety. Based on this, set and communicate KPIs to the stores.

However, establishing KPIs isn’t enough. You should also be able to assess how your stores are performing across each metric. For this, it’s very helpful to get audit scores, compare them over time, and easily retrieve past store visit reports, feedback, comments, status of corrective actions, etc.

2. Schedule Audits in Advance

This gives area managers time to study the previous audit reports and identify the key focus areas. For instance, if a store reported insufficient product knowledge in the last audit, the auditor can spend time assessing the implementation of training modules.

Not all stores are the same. Some may be busy throughout the day, and some may be a few hours. Therefore, coordinate with store managers before scheduling the audit. Also, an advanced audit schedule gives store managers a heads-up to manage their resources.

3. Find the Right Audit Software

A retail software app, like GoAudits, accessible through mobile or a tablet, is ideal as all data – checklists, reports, photos, etc. – is available on the app.

Here’s what Myles Blue of Body Energy Club has to say about GoAudits:

“GoAudits brought us speed, and efficiency and helped us drive our results. We cut our audit times in half. We improved our average audit results, from 75% to above 90% over 6 months.”

Myles Blue, Area Manager, Body Energy Club

The retail inspection app should allow users to take photos and annotate inefficiencies for HQ to offer clear feedback. For example, during a merchandising audit, the HQ teams should be able to view products in the display windows.

The audit software should generate standardized audit reports in a single click, which should mention audit results, scores, further actions, photos, date, place, etc.

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4. Assign and Monitor Corrective Actions

An audit tool should allow users to assign corrective actions and take follow-ups. For instance, the auditor should be able to assign the task of merchandising a high-theft item to the store manager, who in turn should be able to send a status update to the area manager and HQ team.

However stay clear of audit tools that charge extra for non-users like a store manager, unlike GoAudits.

GoAudits gives us consistency in collecting data, setting up action plans, and driving their execution. Ultimately, we are much better equipped to improve results in our business operations.

Kartella Fuller, Director of Operations & Guest Experience, Goodwill of North Georgia

5. Create Standard Digital Checklists

The chosen auditor tool should allow you to build custom checklists based on the retail inspection type, location, region, country, etc.

You must be allowed to add as many questions as you like and in any format – yes/no, if-only, score-based, mandatory, optional, etc. The checklist should have space so that users can add comments and also an option to add photos.

The on-site auditors should be able to access the checklist through portable devices like tablets or mobile phones. With GoAudits, your team can access checklists and complete inspections even offline, allowing you to audit stores in remote locations.

Retail Shop Audit Checklists

Here are free digital retail store audit checklists to inspect premises, departments, retail SOPs, and more.

• Store Visit Checklist
• Product Inspection Checklist
• Retail Safety Audit
• Store Safety Checklist
• Retail Store Mystery Shopper Checklist
• Store Opening Checklist
• Retail Store Closing Checklist
• Store Maintenance Checklist
• Retail Cleaning Checklist
• Merchandising Audit Checklist
• Visual Merchandising Checklist
• Store Manager Checklist
• Retail Store Inspection Checklist
• Loss Prevention Audit Checklist
• BOH Photos Checklist
• Monthly Shop Review Checklist
• Supermarket Parking Inspection Checklist

» Use These Checklists: Sign up with a 14-day free trial to try these checklists.

Establish Brand Standards and Improve Store Performance With GoAudits

Audit in retail is a powerful tool to empower your store business. Thus, many retailers leverage GoAudits to streamline their operations and audit processes.

Read the success story at Goodwill: after testing in one division, the team rolled out GoAudits to 5 additional divisions. The team saves at least 20 hours/week, estimated a direct annual saving of $20,000.

I have thoroughly enjoyed working with GoAudits: the team has been very accommodating and consistently responsive. As the administrator, I keep looking for more ways to leverage the system and streamline our business.

Kartella Fuller, Director of Operations & Guest Experience, Goodwill of North Georgia

With GoAudits, you can:

• Deliver top-notch services to customers, regardless of the store they visit
• Establish brand consistency and reputation
• Assess the effectiveness of merchandising and planograms
• Facilitate communication between HQ and store teams
• Enhance health and safety standards in your stores
• Highlight problems and good-performing stores

Many top businesses in the retail sector have improved their operational consistency and achieved their brand standards by adopting GoAudits as their audit app.

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