7 Ways to Track Your Bottom Line
When times get tougher, it becomes even more important to make sure your business is running like a well-tuned engine. AutoFluent® offers multiple ways to monitor aspects of your shop, helping you make the tweaks and adjustments needed to keep things running optimally. First and foremost for this is your Daily Report. Once you know what to look for, a quick periodic glance at this important tool can help you in various ways. Looking at the last daily report of previous months will help you compare your current progress with other years or times of the year. Here are 7 ways to get a snapshot of your business and how to use them to improve your bottom line.
1. Sales Categories (Daily Report)
This report shows both the sales and profit of your various types of customers. Let’s say your Commercial customers are requiring lots of time and resources lately. Comparing the sales and bottom-line profit dollars for the month with your various other customer types will be very revealing. For example, it may suggest that you need to put more focus on them, or that your efforts may be better spent elsewhere.
2. Item Groups (Daily Report)
This section of the Daily Report can speak volumes about the current state of your business. When you are careful to use appropriate labor codes in your Workorders, and when you have those labor codes connected to specific Item Groups, you can see at a glance what types of services have been performed this period, and how profitable those services have been. You can also see your profit on your various types of parts, tires, etc. This section and the next two sections mentioned below all show daily, monthly and yearly totals, along with a customizable group of totals. In System Settings, you can set this to show totals for the week, the previous month, this month last year, or last month at about the same time of month. Try changing this setting and reprinting daily reports, to see what is most useful to you and your shop.
3. Item Group Subtotals (Daily Report)
This section can be the most useful section of the Daily Report. Item Groups can be grouped together to as many or as few Subtotal Lines as you like. Perhaps you’d like to see sales and profit totals for all parts, tires, labor and fees. Or maybe you’d like one subtotal line to include Brake parts and labor, another Transmission, and another general service. Once these are set up, a quick periodic glance at this report may be all you need to make sure things are running smoothly, or to find areas of your business that are more or less profitable than others. For ideas on setting these up, see our previous blog on Item Groups, or contact an AutoFluent® support technician. (https://autorepairsoftware.com/blog/2019/12/3/item-groups-your-key-to-profit-analysis)
4. Sales Rep Summary (Daily Report)
If your shop sells a lot of parts or tires, it is extremely important to monitor this section. A quick glance will help you know if your sales reps are doing well, and whether they are selling at appropriate margins, or are discounting too heavily.
5. Item Groups by Sales Categories (Customer Report)
This very power management report gives you all the information described in the first three reports above for any period of time. For example, this report can tell you how much sales and profit each of your types of customers (Sales Categories) produced for the first quarter of last year, and then break that down by Item Group, subtotaling by Item Group Subtotals. When it’s time to sit down and analyze the profitability of your business, this is a great report to go to!
6. Comprehensive Sales Report (Customer Report)
Based on suggestions from business analysts, this report breaks down the profit of your parts, labor and tire sales, comparing the day, month-to-date and projected monthly total. It then compares that projected monthly total with both last month and this month last year, to help you get a good grasp on how business is improving. Additionally, the report enables you to make sales goals for each month, and compares your sales with these projections.
7. Comprehensive Group Report (Customer Report)
To dig down into those hard-to-see profit centers of your business, there is the Comprehensive Group Report. This reports sales for the same periods as the Comprehensive Sales Report above, but it is our most customizable report. You can compare the sales of up to 8 different profit centers. Each one can be any combination of Item Groups. You can even save several report layouts and come back to them later.
We help you find the tools that will work best for you. Feel free to contact us with questions on these and other profitability reports that AutoFluent® offers. We developed them specifically to help you improve your bottom line, and they range from simple and automatic to deep and customizable. As always, our goal is to help your business run smoothly and profitably!