Life safety companies need software that gives them immediate answers about their key business drivers. Good reporting and clear dashboards help alarm company owners answer the big question: How are we doing?
Five Key Reporting Metrics You Likely Want to Track
For our customers, this big question will break down into several other questions, all of which get at a company’s key metrics. Below are some examples of questions our dealers ask about their business progress:
- Are we meeting our growth goals?
- Are our job margins on target?
- Is our attrition under control?
- What’s our recurring revenue mix?
- Are we efficiently scheduling and completing our jobs?
There are many questions beyond these, but below we’ll discuss these and how Cornerstone’s reporting suite and dashboards help our customers manage them.
Are we meeting our growth goals?
Growth is the ultimate business imperative. Most companies have at least loose growth objectives—for example, growth at 10%+ annually. Cornerstone has several reports enabling growth tracking, including Invoice History (line item invoice detail), Sales Analysis, Billing Detail, and others. Below is an example from our Sales Analysis report—note the six columns with different metrics all in a single report:
Knowing your different growth metrics can help you be agile in increasing revenue.
Good reports should be able to give you both a summary view, and any granular details you may need. Cornerstone’s reporting suite has dozens of filter options, to retrieve what data subsets you may be looking for—some examples are provided later in this post.
Are our job margins on target?
Life safety companies need to generate healthy margins on service and installation jobs. We recommend that every company be very clear about two things:
- The average blended gross margin expected across jobs, and
- The minimum margin they need on any and all jobs
These measures will help simplify how you quote each job, and will help you know month to month whether your margins are acceptable—or not. Good alarm company software should include job costing that clearly shows prices and costs for parts and labor. This allows our life safety customers to zero in on problems, and fix them. Cornerstone’s quoting module provides the same detail; half the battle is smart quoting to ensure you’re more likely to hit your margin targets:
Job costing reports help you know you are making the right amount of profit for your jobs.
Is our attrition under control?
Attrition is obviously a critical number for life safety companies. It’s perhaps the ultimate measure of customer satisfaction. Below-average attrition rates impact a company’s value, and its ability to sell one day. About a decade ago, Cornerstone built an RMR Tracking & Attrition report, to provide all the granular details related to both RMR growth and attrition—a summary screen is below:
Cornerstone’s attrition report easily shows you increases and decreases in revenue.
Industry lenders and acquirers use our attrition report to lend money and evaluate targets. The best-managed life safety companies are using reports like this every month to evaluate their successes and failures. The bottom line, this report helps them improve their business.
What’s our recurring revenue mix?
In the vast majority of software packages in this industry, recurring revenue is a black box. Though many packages (including QuickBooks) CAN bill recurring services, there’s no easy way to slice and dice the company’s mix of recurring, and drill down on things like service categories, start and end dates, billing methods, and so on.
Well, Cornerstone built a very robust Recurring Research Tool many years ago to solve this problem. We originally built it to help automate the analysis of recurring rates, in order to help enable easier rate increases. Later it was expanded to allow querying—and exporting—recurring charges for a variety of analyses. Below is the tool’s main screen, and note all the options that are offered:
With this tool, a dealer can ask “Do we have accounts with below-market service rates?”, which often leads to rate hikes and therefore more profit. It’s an invaluable dashboard that keeps our customers on top of their RMR.
The value of reporting filters
A good reporting suite offers a wide range of sort and filter options—see screen below from Cornerstone’s Receivable Aging Report:
Filter your reports to exactly what you need to review.
We are adding filter options nearly every month, based on customer requests. They’ll request, “We like this report, but it would really help if it had a filter for X”. By offering these enhancements, we save our customers time by getting them exactly what they need in a report.
Are we efficiently scheduling and completing our jobs?
Job management is key to success in this industry. Getting more work done with the same staff is the definition of increasing productivity. That should be the goal of any company, because all your competitors are working to do the same thing.
Cornerstone offers several “dashboards” to help efficiently view and manage services tickets (jobs), and recently we added an analytics module for tickets, below:
With our dashboard view in your service module, you can always see the status of your tickets.
As you can see, this module quickly helps managers drill down on open tickets—by date, service, status, tech, etc. Again, this detail can be at the heart of weekly management meetings—driving improvements.
Other reporting must-haves: automation and exportability
Finally, a great reporting system will go far beyond just generating reports on the screen for printing to PDF. See below, we have an automated report option that enables our customers (with admin permissions) to automatically run and send reports when desired. We have options for daily, weekly, end of month, and others.
Report automation lets you get the needed data without remembering what to run.
The point of this is saving customers time, and making automatic what many software packages require you to do manually.
Nearly all of Cornerstone’s key reports can be exported to CSV (Excel-compatible) and emailed out of our system. Many customers need to slice, dice, and save information in a flexible format like a spreadsheet. Export options have really become a must have for good software.
Finally, a big trend in reporting is migrating information to dashboards—effectively, these are real-time and often interactive windows built into the software. Some of what’s outline above resides in dashboards—the ticket analytics window, for example. Dashboards have advantages in that they are real time, and can instantly summarize critical metrics for easy view. But some information will always be best accessed through filterable reports.
Questions? Just give us a call at (224) 577-1197.
Cornerstone Billing Solutions is the leading provider of comprehensive billing services and powerful account management software for security alarm dealers nationwide. Call us at 224-577-1197 to learn how Cornerstone’s affordable and time-saving billing services, superior dealer support, and specialized, cloud-based software can help your business improve efficiency and profitability.