Improve your rental business by closely monitoring your key metrics and adjusting your processes. Get the most from your software by creating reports to quickly view status of important business indicators. Your ERP software collects tons of data, so why not use that to better manage your business on a monthly or even weekly basis? There is no reason to wait until the end of the quarter to see how you are doing, instead create reports and dashboards that track process and send those out daily, weekly or monthly to key stake holders.
A few of the reports our rental company clients are finding useful are detailed below.
Reports that tracks rental duration are useful to help you optimize your business mix. If the highest percent of your rentals are monthly rentals, then you need to make sure your monthly rental rates are correct as they are the ones that help you collect the most revenue. Or if you want to improve the daily rentals percent then maybe you may need to lower your daily rate.
A re-rent report lets you manage your re-rent business and ensure you are covering your costs and maximizing profits. You can set up a report that compares revenue versus costs for the re-rent on a monthly basis. Any dips in profit margin can be managed by adjusting rates or evaluating why the costs were higher than expected. Or you can be proactive and create an exception report that emails the operations or branch manager when a re-rent is done under the accepted profit margin.
Fleet utilization is also a key indicator to track and monitor over time. Financial utilization and time utilization are barometers of the health of your organization. Drilling down on this information is critical to knowing when to sell underperforming equipment, buy additional high utilization equipment or raise rates on certain pieces of equipment. It might also help uncover issues with maintenance or areas preventing your equipment from being ready to rent.
In addition to evaluating utilization for your entire rental business, you can more granularly evaluate utilization at the category class and individual equipment level. Reports that show the net ROI by category helps you determine the efficiency of your various product lines. Use that information to look at branches and regional statistics to see how well your managers are managing their fleet. A simple dashboard could be created that shows over and under achieving branches.
Financial dashboards can be created to show which branches are on target to hit their financial goals. A simple red, yellow or green indicator can compare the actual rental revenue to the planned revenue. Reports can be created to run automatically month after month, and dashboards can be created to highlight branches needing more attention.
In addition to financial and fleet management reporting there are also accounting reports that should be looked at each month. One example is to create an accounts receivable report that looks at aging. Reports that show the number and value of accounts past due 60, 90 or 120 days gives you a warning of future revenue changes. A monthly report of these parameters will help to keep your revenue flowing.
There are countless other reports and dashboards that could be created to more effectively run your rental business. Each area of your business is likely to look at different metrics, your fleet team, your operations team, service, finance, etc. all look at different aspects of your business. Evaluate your business and process flows to determine which key indicators are critical to your business. Then work with your ERP provider to capture that data and build reports and visual dashboards that can be shared with key personnel.
Wynne has a robust reporting package that provides roughly 100 stock reports that you can run, as well as the ability to create custom reports. Custom reports lets you create a report or dashboard from virtually any information stored in RentalMan. The package is simple to use and lets you create ongoing or ad-hoc reports yourself without any IT intervention. It is easy to create dashboards for your key performance metrics, KPI, that are automatically run and emailed to key stakeholders each month.
Check out this quick video to see a sample of some of our reports or reach out here for more details or additional help with your reporting needs.
