How Real-Time Reports Help Grow Your Auto Repair Business

Prasanth Chilukuri understands the challenges that shop owners face each day with gaps in their efficiency and margins, which is why he co-founded Tekmetric with Sunil Patel in 2016.

Vehicle Service Pros published some of Prasanth’s tips for strategically growing an auto repair business with a shop management system like Tekmetric.

You can access his full piece here, or check out some of the highlights below.

Balance Is Key to Making Better-Informed Business Decisions

Shop owners make countless daily decisions that affect their customers, their team, and their business.

Making good business decisions is essential to keeping everyone happy and keeping the lights on in the shop, but how do you know what the right decision is?

According to Prasanth, the key to any successful business is finding the right balance between soft skills like intuition or relationship-building and hard skills like data analysis.

Both types of skills are important, but knowing when to employ each one is the trick to making better-informed decisions and growing your business.

Intuition is useful when shop owners have to make split-second decisions and often goes hand in hand with interpersonal skills. The auto repair industry isn’t just about cars, after all; it’s about people, too.

By learning how to pick up on cues and anticipate the needs of customers, employees, and vendors, shop owners can foster long-lasting relationships that grow alongside their business.

Of course, there’s only one way to know whether your shop is truly turning a profit: look at the numbers and analyze the results. Data can support any hunches you have about the health of your business, for better or for worse, so you can plan accordingly.

But if your shop is still tied to manual methods, gathering key information about parts usage and labor costs is probably not easy or convenient.

Why Manual Methods Just Can’t Keep Up

A shop management system might not be able to make business decisions for you, but it can help shop owners make sense of their key metrics and data. According to Prasanth, looking at the cold, hard facts is essential to boost the efficiency and profitability of the shop.

The science of data might seem contrary to the art of intuition at first, but they’re more related than you might think. As Prasanth describes, data can add support to a shop owner’s intuition or observations and reveal key information that can’t necessarily be gathered from conversations with customers and employees.

Unfortunately, trying to sort through the shop’s data by hand can be exhausting and often means missing family dinners to crunch the numbers after hours. And manually calculating daily, weekly, or monthly metrics can quickly become a headache with much larger room for human error.

Without real-time reporting tools, inventory counts and gross profit can’t necessarily be trusted and will always provide an out-of-date view of your business at best.

Being tied to manual processes for data collection also means being tied to the shop and losing out on valuable face-to-face time with the customers supporting the business.

As a result, shop owners are often left making the difficult decision between nurturing their intuition and building relationships, or focusing on the data and shop profitability when both are essential to the long-term success of the business. With Tekmetric, you can do both.

Get the Full Picture With Tekmetric

Tekmetric is a shop management system that comes fully equipped with business reporting tools within a repair orders software suite.

Tekmetric tracks key performance indicators like employee efficiency, parts usage, and profitability ‘round the clock so shop owners can focus on the more high-level aspects of their business.

Real-time reports are always available with numbers that are already calculated and organized.

A bird’s eye view of the shop gives shop owners the power to tailor their business plan and strategy by:

• ​Adjusting parts and labor matrices to maximize margins
• ​Extending or removing a running promotion
• ​Deciding to add more people to the team
• ​Knowing when it’s the right time to expand the business with new bays or by opening a new location

Reading Your Shop’s Report Card

Conference season is still a couple of months away, but part of growing a business is keeping up with industry trends and seeking out learning opportunities. Prasanth wants to make sure that shop owners are educated about the abundance of tools available to them year-round.

And he also understands that getting acquainted with a new shop management system can be a bit of a learning curve, especially with so many different reports to sift through.

Prasanth and Sunil built Tekmetric with shop owners in mind, making sure data visuals are intuitive and easy to understand. At just a glance, shop owners can clearly spot data trends and adjust the shop’s operations as needed.

Real-time reports generally fall into one of these four categories:

• ​Financial Reports: End of Day, Sales, Tax, etc.
• ​Employee Activity and Labor Reports: Efficiency and Sales
• ​Customer Activity Reports: Job History, Declined Jobs, Lead and Marketing Source
• ​Parts Reports: Parts Ordered and Parts Usage

Financial Reports

These reports help shop owners assess the health of their business by tracking trends in the day-to-day operations and profitability of a shop within a specific time range.

Knowledge is power, and having a clear view of your financial forecast is crucial to making financially responsible decisions.

Employee Activity and Labor Reports

Tracking employee-related metrics is essential to keeping track of shop morale.

Staying clued in to what’s happening with productivity, Close Ratio, and Average Repair Order totals can help shop owners make informed decisions related to employee management and training.

Customer Activity Reports

Providing good customer service can be a differentiating factor for building customer loyalty.

Customer activity reports help shop owners keep track of how each customer interacts with the shop and what keeps them coming back.

The Declined Jobs report also makes it easier for service advisors to follow up with customers and help maintain their vehicles.

Parts Reports

It can be frustrating when the numbers don’t add up. Tekmetric makes parts management and reconciliation a breeze so that shop owners can ensure they are buying the appropriate parts and pricing them accordingly.

The Winning Formula for Shop Success

If you ask Prasanth how to run a business, he’ll tell you it’s an art and a science. The key to making good business decisions is following your gut while also supporting your hunches with real-time data.

Even if the numbers aren’t where you want them to be, Tekmetric’s real-time reports give you the data and insights you need to turn things around for your business and for your team.

The winning formula for shop success starts with you.

FAQ

More articles

Do you ever wish you could see into the future? As a business owner, being able to predict how much business you will get during a week, a month, or a year can help you make important decisions regarding marketing your services, taking on more work, hiring more employees, or even knowing when to expand your business.

Of course, there are always going to be unforeseen situations. No matter how much technology you have, there’s no surefire way to predict accidents, natural disasters, or other changes in life circumstances. Fortune telling aside, shop owners can use real-time reports to forecast the health of their business and get a sense of how much money their garage is expected to make before the end of a week, month, or year.

Here’s how you can leverage two of Tekmetric’s real-time reports in combination to forecast your shop’s performance and test the decisions you make as a shop owner.

Your automotive shop is the beating heart of your business. A well-designed basic auto shop layout can streamline operations and refine your business.

When you plan to refresh your auto mechanic shop, consider how to make efficient use of your available space, enhance safety, refine the look and feel of the shop, and improve customer comfort. Most of all, upgrading the technology that forms the backbone of your business is a major component of a modern auto shop.

Manage space effectively

No matter how much square footage your shop has, you can maximize your layout to house everything you need. Consider the size and shape of your space before you commit to a specific layout. Evaluate the services you currently or intend to provide so you can plan your space safely and efficiently.

Some of those considerations include:

• ​Equipment locations: Look at your permanent installations, such as lifts and compressors as well as movable items.
• ​Storage: Organize storage areas so parts and equipment are easily accessible and tidy, both making them easy to find and improving your shop’s appearance and parts storage.
• ​Working areas: Set up your workbenches and counter space so technicians can perform detail work away from the vehicle.
• ​Loading bays: Verify your loading bay areas have adequate clearance.
• ​Waiting rooms: Design an appealing space so your customers have a clean, well-lit, and comfortable place to wait.
• ​Administrative offices: Make sure your employees have all the tools they need to keep the business running efficiently.

Effective space management also plays a big part in keeping an auto shop safe.

Introducing Tekmerchant

Tekmerchant now includes the industry’s first “buy now, pay later” feature, allowing customers to complete vehicle repairs and pay over time with no risk to your shop!

The Tekmerchant platform offers flexible, forward thinking solutions that allow shops to save time and effort when managing funds and customer payments.

Shop owners can share invoices and accept payments via text and email, enabling the customer to pay directly from their smartphone and pick up the vehicle when it is convenient for them.

Additionally, customers can leverage Tekmerchant’s “buy now, pay later” feature using Affirm and Klarna. This is an industry-first solution that is familiar to customers who use it in other industries.

Concurrently, Tekmerchant improves shop owner accounting processes by automatically integrating all partial and complete payments into the point-of-sale.

This feature, added by popular request from shop owners, integrates with Tekmetric’s existing payments reports for real-time tracking and reporting.