Insights are only as good as the information is accurate.

In this guide, we will walk through how to provide Genie with as much data as possible to ensure that your insights, reporting, and analytics are accurate and useful. We won't get too deep in the weeds as you can find more comprehensive guides in our help center.

We will be looking at how to configure your insight settings, manage suppliers, manage purchase orders, exclude products, and map your bundles to ensure that Genie analyzes the data that matters.

Your insight settings provide context to your data and help tailor your insights to your business needs. If your insights are off, so are your reports. Configuring them is simple:

Step 1: Navigate to the settings tab then over to your insight settings.

Your insight settings consist of your Average Daily Sales, Stock Level settings, and Grading settings. Together these settings provide you with a ton of information on sales velocity, performance, and the status of your products.

Let's start with your Average Daily Sales. This setting allows you to change the period of time used to calculate your sales. This means if you were to select 30 days, Genie would use the last 30 days of sales data to calculate an avg. that is displayed on your inventory table. So say you just launched a product last week, you may change this setting to 7 days so you can get a good idea of how well the new product was selling.

Step 2: You can adjust these settings to align with business goals by selecting a date range that fits. We suggest going for the last 30 days.

These next settings are very important. Configuring your Lead Time and Stock Buffer helps determine your Running low threshold and helps you track incoming shipments. When you configure these settings here, you are setting them at a global level. This means that any products in your inventory and any that are subsequently added will use these settings.

Now, let's configure your stock-level settings.

Step 3: Set your lead time to the average lead time your suppliers use. Outside of connecting individual products to suppliers, this is as close as you can get to accurate in-transit insights. We recommend setting it to 30 if you aren't sure, as this is a good baseline amount of time.

Step 4: Set your stock buffer to the amount of stock (in days) you want to keep on hand at all times. This ensures that you can still meet demand even when running low.

Step 5: As for your running low, and overstocked thresholds, they should be set to something you feel comfortable with. Running low accounts for both lead times and stock buffer, so you will want to keep it higher than their combined sum. So, 45 is fine, 60 is also a good choice. Overstocked, should be set to an amount you are okay with keeping on hand but is still manageable. So if your bottom limit is 45-60 your upper limit might be closer to 100-120. This gives you about four months of stock to pay around with.

Finally, we have your Product Grading which is used to categorize your products based on performance. There are three components of product grading, the calculation period, grade by, and weight. Together these create the very useful A, B, and C categorization of your products.

To configure them all you need to do is:

Step 6: Select the calculation period you would like to use. Just like avg. daily sales you can choose from 7, 30, 60, or 90 days. Depending on the one you choose your products may be categorized differently.

Step 7: Select the grade by variable. This will determine how your products will be graded, whether by how much they contribute to profit and revenue, or how much is sold by quantity.

Step 8: Adjust the weight of each grade. Adjusting the weight is one of the more important aspects of grading. This determines how much each letter is worth. By default A = 80%, B = 15%, and C = 5% or less. So, for example, if you set the grade by to revenue, and keep the weights where they are, a product that contributes the most to your revenue (part of the top 80%) will have an A grade. By contrast, if a product has no sales, or contributes the least to revenue (part of the bottom 5%) it will have a C grade.

Configuring grading to fit your business goals and needs can help you identify your top-performing products at a glance without having to dig into the numbers.

Step 9: Once you have everything configured to your liking, you can Save the settings.

Managing your suppliers is another way to ensure your insights are as accurate as possible. Your suppliers' details ensure correct lead times are associated with the right products. For now, this guide will provide you with high-level information, if you want to learn how to add suppliers to your products, check out this guide in our help center.

To manage suppliers in Genie you will first need to create a supplier.

Step 1: Navigate to the Suppliers tab.

Step 2: Click "Create a supplier."

Step 3: This will bring you to a page where you can enter your supplier's information including name, location, address, lead time, and minimum order quantity. Not all of this information is required outside of Lead Time, MOQ, and Address. These three pieces of information ensure that Genie can provide accurate In-Transit times for products linked to that supplier.

Step 4: Once you have entered all the information click Save and leave. The new supplier will appear at the top of the list.

Finally, to ensure your reports are accurate, you should consider Excluding Products and Mapping Bundles. Excluding products allows you to remove them from your inventory (not literally) so they aren't used to generate insights. This would be your gift cards, packaging, shipping protection, limited-time products, or gifts. Things that you normally wouldn't include in your analysis because they don't count toward your overall revenue or profit goals.

Bundle mapping ensures that your sales data is properly attributed to the right products. Unless you already have a tool to bundle your products, Genie offers bundle mapping to ensure that the products sold together are properly shown in your analytics. This means if you're selling a t-shirt, and pants bundle the sales are going to that specific variant of shirt and pants, not to the bundle itself.

Let's start with how to exclude products.

Step 1: Navigate to the settings tab, then to the exclude products tab.

step 2: Search for the product(s) you want to exclude. This could be gift cards, discontinued products, promotional items, etc.

Step 3: Select the product(s) and click add and they will be added to the list on this page. And that's it.

Alternatively, you can also re-include products. If you want to add the products back to your analysis, select the product(s) from the list. Then select the back arrow located under the search bar to re-include the products.

Now, let's navigate over to the Bundle Mapping tab.

Mapping bundles in Genie isn't straightforward at the time of writing this article. For now, the process entails collecting the links to your bundles, selecting "request update" and sending the request to the Genie team. From there the Genie team will work to pull your bundles and each associated variant and import them into your account.

However, after the team has imported your bundles you can check this page to make sure they are accurate. Mapping bundles is a continuous process, meaning whenever you have new bundles or new variants to bundles, you must request a change to ensure your sales are properly attributed.

With that, we have come to the end of the guide on ensuring your reports are accurate. By following these steps you will provide the necessary context for Genie to provide you with better insights and more accurate reporting.