How did your roofing business perform this past year? Now is the time of year when many contractors evaluate business performance of the past year. It’s a good time to take stock of how you did and determine what might need to be adjusted for 2020. Year-end reporting provides a snapshot of business trends, but with so much data to evaluate, it can be complicated and overwhelming. Business owners can get lost in small details and miss the big picture. Interpreting the data and making decisions based on it presents challenges as well. Even if you’re using roofing software to generate reports, knowing where to start can be tough.
At AccuLynx, we’ve got lots of experience with guiding roofers through their year-end reporting. Here are a few of the reports that can yield helpful insights for 2020—and why they’re important. All of these reports, which are available in the AccuLynx ReportsPlus feature, can help you pinpoint key business trends.
Four Pieces of Year-End Reporting to Look For
A/R Age by Salesperson Reports
What it is: A breakdown of your total accounts receivable (A/R) according to the length of time invoices have been outstanding, grouped by salesperson.
Why it matters: Every roofing business owner knows that it’s important to keep track of A/R in order to manage cash flow and assets. However, things can get busy and it may have been a while since you checked on your A/R. Evaluating the A/R Age reports over the past twelve months can help you see how long it took your invoices to get paid and which accounts delayed payment the longest. You can also see if there are any commonalities between type of job and length of time to pay, or salesperson and length of time to pay.
Extensive delays in payment from multiple accounts can be a sign that something needs to change in your business model or in the way you send invoices. If your A/R Age by Salesperson report is showing lots of outstanding invoices that stay outstanding for a long time, you may want to keep track of A/R more frequently, set up reminders to contact customers that haven’t paid, or send invoices to customers electronically.
Read: What Custom Reporting Does for Roofers
Closing Percentage Reports
What it is: A report that shows how many of your sales closed, versus how many potential customers you attempted to sell. Closing percentages can be measured for an individual salesperson or for the company as a whole.
Why it matters: Closing percentage isn’t the only number you should look at to evaluate your sales performance—after all, if you pitched 4 customers on your roofing business, and 2 sales close, your closing percentage would be 50%, but your sales themselves would be dismal. If you’re looking for a simple way to identify the effectiveness of your sales efforts in 2019, closing percentage is a place to start.
Your closing percentage will help you decide whether or not you should adjust your sales strategy. Are your salespeople chasing a lot of customers that have a low chance of buying your services? Are you competing for enough deals? Do you need to change how you’re advertising your business or which neighborhoods you’re canvassing? These are all questions you can start to answer when you look at your closing percentage and evaluate it alongside the rest of your business trends.
Lead Source Report
What it is: A report that shows where your leads are coming from.
Why it matters: Do you feel like your roofing business didn’t get enough leads this year? Taking a look at your lead source reports can help you identify where you might be able to get more leads. There might be untapped or underutilized sources for leads that could represent growth areas for you in 2020.
If you spent a lot of time and effort on a particular source and it didn’t result in many leads, you might want to reconfigure your strategy in the new year. It’s also helpful to investigate which sources led to leads that closed. If one source seems low in leads but all the leads from that source closed, it might be worth shifting emphasis to pursuing leads from that source, as opposed to a source which produced lots of leads that didn’t close.
Read: How to Get Powerful Business Insights with Custom Reporting in AccuLynx
Job Milestones Report
What it is: A report that shows the average length of time it takes for jobs to reach each milestone.
Why it matters: Looking at how roofing jobs move through the pipeline—from closed deal to paid in full—provides important insights into breakdowns in your process. If jobs spend a lot of time in one particular spot, look at what might be causing that delay. For instance, are a lot of your jobs spending excessive time between closing the deal and starting work? There might be a problem with ordering the right materials or scheduling crews in a timely manner. By evaluating the length of time it takes jobs to reach each milestone, roofing business owners can put strategies in place to keep work flowing more smoothly in 2020.
The amount of data available in year-end reporting can seem daunting. But when roofers start by looking at these four reports, they can learn important information about 2019 business performance—and equip themselves for 2020 with the data to make great decisions.
