Highlights:
- Your company’s revenue is also your personal income and path to retirement
- Revenue analytics help small business owners understand sales trends and make better decisions
- Three ways to dashboard revenue: DIY, software add-ons, analytics suites
Your business is more than a source of goods, services, and employment for your customers and employees. Above all, it’s your livelihood. It’s your personal income, your path to retirement, and a financial asset you’ve worked hard to build.
The most fundamental way to begin maximizing the value of your business — and, therefore, increase your personal income — is to better understand your company’s revenue trends. Thankfully, technology has come a long way in making this process simple and easy.
Small businesses track revenue in a number of ways, from simple paper ledgers to spreadsheets to sophisticated accounting software packages and business reporting software. No matter how you track sales, you probably don’t have a deep understanding of your company’s revenue trends unless you’re pulling all that sales data out of its back-office hiding places and into an easy-to-read dashboard. Just ask Mike Letcher, owner of Letcher Bros. Auto Repair in Pinole, California, about the surprises to be found in daily revenue snapshots.
If you want to start tracking revenue trends on a daily and weekly basis, you have a few options:
- Do-it-yourself (DIY): If you’re tracking revenue on spreadsheets like Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets, you can build custom charts and graphs to visualize your company’s revenue trends over time. This is typically the cheapest option, but it requires a lot more time and technical skill. If you go this route, be sure your source data is correct because 9 in 10 spreadsheets contain “significant errors.” It would be a shame to put so much manual effort into building charts and graphs based on inaccurate information!
- Software add-ons: If your company uses an accounting software system like Quickbooks or Xero, you can purchase add-on software that turns your sales data into revenue dashboards. These systems require at least one additional step (and sometimes more) to pull sales data out of the accounting system and into the analytics app, but they also offer deeper accounting capabilities that larger companies with dedicated finance teams might find useful.
- Analytics suites: If your company accepts credit card payments, analytics suites are a simple, powerful, and accurate option for better understanding your company’s revenue. Womply, for example, turns your actual transaction data into easy-to-read sales dashboards that update automatically, so there’s no manual work involved. This enables you to see patterns such as which days you make the most money, who your best customers are, and how your revenue stacks up against other local businesses (and much, much more). Learn more, plus get free reputation monitoring and customer insights when you sign up for Womply Free!
It’s your money, so be sure you know everything about it. With a clearer picture of your company’s revenue trends, you can make even more money to grow your business or enjoy a better lifestyle. Either way, you deserve it!