How To Gauge The Productivity Of Your Small Business With Reporting And Analysis
Using technology like service business software to track your company’s performance may seem daunting, but it doesn't have to be. With the right tools, you can have all the information needed to make smart business decisions.
Table of Contents
How does Productivity Reporting Affect Your Bottom Line?
What Reports on Productivity do You Need in Place?
Define Your Success Metrics
Examples of Reports For Your Business
Final Thoughts
Small-business owners all have a tendency to wear many hats and take on a number of responsibilities to make sure their business is successful. But if you have no idea how productive you are on a daily basis, you may feel overwhelmed with small urgent tasks and lose your focus on important things. Make sure you don't run into that problem! All you have to do is take the time to set up a system to track your numbers so you can see what's working and what's not. This will give you a clear idea of where you want to spend your time and your resources. This post will show you how easily you can do this using modern appliance repair business software.
How does Productivity Reporting Affect Your Bottom Line?
Productivity is an important factor in running a successful service business. If you don't know where your company stands, how can you grow and maintain a positive bottom line? You won’t be able to either objectively assess your employee workload efficiency or control business costs.
The main idea of measuring productivity is defined by how much you produce with a given input. Productivity measurement also includes time efficiency, output, and effort.
If you are an Orderry user, it won’t be a problem for you to find all important metrics that show your company's productivity at any time and from anywhere. On your smartphone, you can quickly view work order, inventory, cash flow, or sale summary reports in the Orderry Business Insights app.
Business KPIs in the Orderry Business Insights App
On other devices, use the Business Dashboard to see all the crucial numbers at a glance. Click on the Analytics icon in your Orderry account to analyze your metrics in five key areas: work order processing, sales, finances, employees, and company rating.
Key Performance Indicators in the Orderry Dashboard
What Reports on Productivity do You Need in Place?
One of the first things you should do is determine what you actually mean by productivity. In other words, what do you want employees to be doing when they're productive? Some managers might want to measure the time it takes an employee to complete a work order, for example. Other employers might want employees to be productive in a way that helps them grow or develop new skills, which might lead to a different measurement, such as the number of new skills learned.
In order for a productivity report to be effective, it needs to be accurate, transparent, and clear. While there are many different ways to document productivity, they all have the same goal in mind, which is to measure the work that has been done, the time spent on the work, and how much work has been done relative to the time spent. Here are some of the examples: labor efficiency, deadline compliance, absenteeism, and sick time.
Define Your Success Metrics
While a metric is a figure that gives you an idea of the size of the thing being measured, success is a subjective term — one that is based on where you're currently at in your journey, and where you want to go in the future. If you’re a small business owner with a team, then your definition of success might be different from that of an independent contractor.
In order to measure success, it's important to define the metrics you feel are the most important to keep an eye on. E.g., how much revenue did you make? How many work orders were created yesterday/last month/a year ago? To what level of detail do you want to measure progress? Learn more about KPIs for small service businesses in this article.
Examples of Reports For Your Business
In general terms, a report is a document that tells you what's been happening over a period of time. In business, the term typically refers to a summary of a company's financial performance for a specific period of time. Here are some examples of service business reports that you can use to measure your success:
What is Revenue Reporting?
This type of report highlights the sales of each service or product group, the growth of overall revenue each month as well as looks at the revenue numbers of last periods by each location/product line/employee.
What is a Sales Report?
The numbers here will help you find out which sales rep is performing the best and which products are most popular among your clients.
What is a Profit and Loss Report?
When growing a service business, you will definitely need to watch profit and loss statements for measuring your performance during certain intervals. These statements show the profit or loss accrued by the business for a reporting period (an entire quarter, an individual month, etc.). Many factors contribute to the earnings over a specific period of time, including expenses, cost of goods sold, sales revenue, operating costs, taxes, interest, etc.
What is an Inventory Report?
For you as a business owner, tracking metrics for inventory management will help you determine which items are in stock and how much merchandise you need to order. You can also use the report to compare inventory levels over time to assess your pricing policy.
In Orderry’s Company Insights, you can view all important reports on one page in form of readable diagrams and trends.
Screenshot of the Company Insights Report in Orderry
Final Thoughts
Productivity reports are essential for maintaining the health of your small business and it’s important to know what you should be monitoring. There are a lot of ways you can use reports in your company. If you can look at them in the right way and find the best ones for you, these reports will help you learn about the things you do best and predict the things you need to do to succeed.