To answer this, you have to analyze the benefits in terms of REAL dollars your business spends today and figure out your return on investment (ROI). There are several primary categories to consider visualizing your current expenditure in manual or duplicate processes. Now grab a piece of paper, or use our automated ROI calculation tool here.
How much time does your company spend every day on the following tasks:
- Dispatch manually or with 3rd party service software
- Communicating status, availability, and progress with customers
- Printing, organizing and dealing with paperwork for techs
- Calls/Text/email to and from techs and salespeople
- Manual reports or internal paperwork (Excel, or written forms)
- Taking notes manually and managing opportunities manually
- Looking up customer, equipment, and warranty history on service calls
- Duplicate data entry
- Manual work-in-progress billing
- Correcting errors
- Reviewing work (paper, or matching accounting/service system info) and billing
- Managing purchase orders, sending/receiving, and duplicate entry on vendor web portals
- Matching AP transactions and issuing payments, dealing with bank statements and credit cards
- Managing AR and Collections
- Manual journal entries, tax reporting, and payroll reporting
- Paying outside bookkeepers to produce reports
- Managing and tracking sales, quotes, orders and improving the sales process
Integrated door dealer business systems like ours are designed to reduce or eliminate these processes entirely. For most business owners calculating the labor capital you have tied up in day to day processes is painful, but also necessary, especially if you want to grow. Unfortunately, many small door companies refuse to see the capital they have buried in these processes, and therefore remain small companies chaotic companies forever.
If you really want to give yourself a splitting headache, look at each of the bullet points above then add up how much time each employee (or group of employees) in your business spends on every activity in a day, multiply that by their hourly rate (or just use an average for now), and you have your daily investment for all of the things that a complete integrated door dealer business system is designed to eliminate or streamline. Ouch!
Now for the light-bulb moment, multiply that daily total by the number of days a month or year your business operates, and ask yourself if it makes sense to invest in a complete integrated door dealer business system? Your answer will depend on the cost of the system, but now you have a point of reference, and a good way to visualize costs and benefits. Plus, you will never forget that number!
We invite you to look at the Insite4Doors system powered by Acumatica. We’ve spent over 25 years working with door dealers to solve complex business challenges with technology. We can stop the pain and help your door business grow.
Lets talk!