Unfortunately, when you do this, you lose sight of the value that can be derived from reports when you invest in running them. After all, end-of-year reporting is an important way to keep your finger on the pulse of your business. By pulling vital reports, you allow yourself to make data-informed decisions for the year ahead.
If you’re thinking about pulling reports for your landscaping business, you might be wondering which ones are most important. Here are 6 that we suggest you run to review your last year and plan for the future.
Payroll reports help you keep track of payroll details and history, which is vital information in making financial decisions. Some of the most common payroll reports that you might consider running include the following:
Your company’s profit & loss report is different from your balance sheet. The latter is meant to be more of a quick snapshot. But a profit & loss report looks at how much money was earned, how much money it cost, and how much money is left for profit.
There are 5 key factors you should be looking at in your profit & loss statement. These include the following:
In order to truly dig deeper and understand your income and how it relates to profitability, it can be helpful to run department-specific income reports. By looking at the data by department, you can determine whether there are certain areas of your business that need more attention than others.
As an employer, one of your business responsibilities is to provide reports to employees and subcontractors showing them their income from the previous year. For employees, this report is a W2 and for contract workers, this form is 1099. These reports are due by the end of January of the following year. Of course, on top of sharing these reports with employees with subs, you must also file copies of these reports with the IRS and Social Security Administration by the end of January.
A truly helpful employee evaluation report is contingent upon data. For instance, data about attendance would alert you to how often each employee is late to work or has even been a no-show. Data that tracks job costing, on the other hand, will allow you to calculate how efficient your employees are being. This type of information is vital in evaluating employee performance.
In looking back at your past year and planning ahead for the future, you should also be measuring your sales activity. Of course, this is something you should already be doing periodically. Two of the key areas that you should specifically hone in on, in order to learn from the past and improve in the future, is closing ratio reports and pipeline forecasting.
These reports take a detailed look at proposed work compared to closed sales. Measuring these figures can help you determine which salespeople need support, what service lines should get the most focus, and gather information for sales pipeline forecasting.
Knowing the closing percentages allows you to evaluate how many proposals are out and to determine a predictable amount of sales that will be closed in the near future. If you’re missing your mark, these reports give your sales team areas of focus to keep specific crews busy with a flow of already sold work. The resulting data will then help your operations team plan for the impending work.
With the right landscaping business reporting software, pulling reports should be easy since all of the information is already there. There is no additional work that needs to be done. The complete ease of use with a system like this will help hold you accountable to actually doing it—and your business will reap the rewards. After all, there’s simply no better way to make wiser decisions for a new year than to review data and make critical real-time choices.
With all that being said, let us add a word about budgets. Most businesses usually spend January working on their budget and don’t really take time to ever look at it again. But with how easy it is to review financials and run reports using the right landscaping business software, we would suggest the “Frank Ross” method of looking at (and updating) budget every single month.
By taking these steps and staying on top of your business, you can feel confident that you’re setting yourself up for success for the new year—and for future years to come.
If you want to find out more about how landscaping business software can help you easily run year-end reports, let’s explore and see what Asset can do for you. If you love running reports, here’s another resource for you!