Tips & Tricks - Sales Analysis and Physical Inventory Counts

Analyzing Your Success 
Another year has closed, and you have used AutoFluent to store and monitor your sales, inventory and cost of good sold throughout 2017.  Now it’s time to reap the rewards! By understanding what parts of your business are more profitable, and what kinds of inventory move more quickly, you can make decisions and policies that will bring even more success in the years to come: 

  • The new Inventory Annual Sales Summary report is a great way to see the year at a glance.  It lists your inventory, with a column for each of the last 12 months, showing your quantity sold, on hand, and your reorder levels.  Use this report to check your reorder levels, watch for seasonal trends, and see your ‘dead’ stock.  You can even use the report for your labor items to see trends with your various services!

  • The Customer Comprehensive Sales Report and Comprehensive Group Report are excellent for comparing the current month’s sales with the previous month and year.  The Group Report allows for 7 customizable categories to analyze which parts of your business are the most profitable. The Sales Report breaks your profit down by parts, tires, labor, etc.  The Sales Report also gives you a car count and average invoice amount, and tells you how close you are to your monthly sales goals and projections.  These two reports also compare your store locations if you have more than one.

  • The Inventory Sales Report with Year-to-Date Totals is another good report for monitoring reorder levels.  You compare sales, profit and purchases in a given month or quarter with the entire year, revealing what your most profitable items are.  

  • The Inventory Summary reports enable you be very specific about which items you want to view.  The ‘Sold Since’, ‘Not Sold Since’, and ‘Not Purchased Since’ dates let you ask questions such as, “Which items did I sell in the first half of the year, but not the second?”

  • One of our favorite reports is the Item Groups by Sales Category report.  For any time period, this report will break down sales and profit for each of your item groups, giving your subtotals for each type of group, such as parts, labor, tires and fees. Then, it will give you this information for each type of customer (Sales Category) you have, such as Retail, Commercial, etc.  

Counting Your Inventory
No inventory system is complete without effective tools to help you count your inventory, and identify discrepancies due to entry errors or theft.  Whether you have a warehouse or a few shelves of filters, your inventory is an important and vulnerable part of your business. You know it is important to stay on top of it by counting your inventory regularly. AutoFluent offers a few methods to choose from, depending on your preferences and needs, and on how you do business:

Method 1

  • Print the Physical Inventory Report, or the Bin Count Sheet if you use bins.

  • Walk down your isles, writing the correct quantities on the report.

  • In the Physical Inventory screen, start a new session, and go down the list, entering the correct quantities.

  • In the same screen, print the report and close the session, updating your inventory.

Method 2

  • On a tablet PC, go to the Physical Inventory screen, and start a session.

  • Walk down your isles, entering the correct quantities in the grid. If you are using bins (assigning bins to shelves or aisles), you can select the bin to help you find the items. If your items have barcodes assigned to them, you can even scan the inventory items.

  • In the same screen, print the report and close the session, updating your inventory.

Method 3

  • Print the Physical Inventory Report or Bin Count Sheet, and export it to excel.

  • Count your inventory and update the quantities in the spreadsheet.

  • In the Utility menu, select Import into / Update your Min Inventory to import the quantities into your inventory.

Dave Tittle