- 15 Aug 2024 Author: Michael Johnson
As a Financial Controller, you're responsible for keeping a dealership afloat and operational. After all, if there isn't any cash flow, everything will grind to a dramatic halt, from payroll to stock management to overheads like rent and telephone bills.
Beyond this, Financial Controllers play a key role in using automotive dealer analytics to define a strategic financial direction for the dealership. This involves interpreting key financial data to determine how best to achieve core business objectives. However, the quality of insight depends on the quality of that financial data. Are you working with a mess of spreadsheets across departments or a single hub of reliable business intelligence?
In this article, we'll explore a few ways Financial Controllers can get the best dealership intelligence for better, more informed decision-making.
What's the true cost of spreadsheets?
Spreadsheets have been a finance staple for generations. For those of us who remember manual ledgers, the ease and convenience of a digital spreadsheet like Excel are still extremely attractive. The problem is that technology has progressed significantly, and there are objectively better ways to analyse and interpret dealership finances.
Relying on spreadsheets not only makes it more difficult to garner workable insights – it can actively damage your dealership's bottom line. For instance, in a whitepaper by Quantrix, spreadsheets were revealed to drive up costs through lost productivity, opportunity costs, prevalent errors, and a lack of scalability.
Business Intelligence is the way forward
In its modern iteration, Business Intelligence (BI) typically refers to the gathering, analysis and visualisation of business data using specialised tools and software. Ease of use and a great user experience are key to effective business intelligence tools, facilitating the swift comprehension of insights from any given data set. As a result, BI tools typically include dashboards that clearly give key stakeholders – like financial controllers or dedicated BI analysts – the information they need to make better business decisions.
Stay Competitive With Automotive Business Intelligence
Some key advantages of dealership business intelligence over spreadsheets include:
Volume and scalability
Dealership intelligence tools are built to handle high volumes of data from all dealership departments. Where a traditional spreadsheet would slow down and create bottlenecks, BI platforms boost efficiencies and empower the business to move forward. This is especially valuable for growing dealerships, as scalability and performance are key features of many BI tools, such as SalesLogs.
Security and Access
As standalone software solutions, data security and compliance are standard across dealership intelligence solutions. This means that data stored and processed on the cloud is often more secure than files saved on a local machine within a business premises. Financial Controllers also have more control over which employees have access to what data. The SalesLogs multi-level permissions feature, for example, allows administrators to set "edit", "view-only", or "restricted" access on a departmental or individual basis.
Accuracy across departments
With financial data coming in from different parts of the business, it's easy for errors or duplicates to creep into your financial analysis. With dealership analytics and BI tools like SalesLogs, every team is feeding information into the same system. So instead of data headaches and costly broken spreadsheets, you can enjoy a single source of truth visualised in a clear, useful way.
We've only scratched the surface of what a dealership intelligence tool like SalesLogs has to offer your business. If you want to move your business away from spreadsheets and towards better, more informed decision-making, click the button below to book a demo.
