Dealerships may not be the first business owners think about when optimizing profit, but they can benefit significantly from accurate accounting practices. By maintaining accuracy in your dealership’s accounting, you can make more insightful revenue forecasts and better manage your budget.
Inventory Management
Inventory management is crucial to any business that sells physical products. Properly managing stock levels can help a company avoid wastage, improve profits, and make sales forecasts.
It also ensures enough stock is always available to meet customer demand without tying up too much capital in inventory. Excess inventory costs a company money just by sitting there, while an inventory shortage can lead to missed sales opportunities and disappointed customers. One way to ensure your inventory is accurate is by using an accounting equation and performing periodic physical inventory counts. These can be done daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly depending on the size of your business.
Taking a physical count can be a simple process that saves your business time and helps you maintain your inventory levels. However, taking these counts on a schedule that makes sense for your business is essential. In addition, you should make sure that all shipments are carefully reviewed before they are shipped to your dealership. This can include looking for damage to the product, missing parts, or damaged packaging. Aside from physically reviewing all shipments, you should also perform spot-checks on completed inventory sheets to identify any discrepancies in the inventory count. Theft, damaged goods, or incorrect data input can cause these.
Profitability
Accurate accounting practices can benefit a dealership in many ways. One way is by allowing for better profitability, which can result in higher income. Car dealers profit from various sources, including selling new and used vehicles and the extras accompanying them, such as insurance, leases, loans, warranties and service contracts. They can also boost their profits by introducing add-ons to their customers that increase their overall value. Another way dealers can increase their profitability is through leasing, which is becoming more popular. Leasing vehicles allows dealers to charge higher rates while still looking attractive to consumers.
This can be a significant source of profit for auto dealerships because it will enable them to offer to finance to those needing help getting a loan from a bank or other financial institution. It can also help them charge lower rates for a certain amount of time, improving their overall revenue. Accurate accounting practices are essential to ensuring any automotive dealership’s success. Having the proper financial information can aid in making decisions about product mix, pricing and other factors that impact profitability. In addition, this information can be used by managers and analysts to evaluate a business’s performance.
Customer Service
Keeping the accounting department on top of its game can make all the difference in your customer service. Accurate financial statements will help you understand how much cash and credit you have available to purchase inventory, pay vendors, and give you the peace of mind that your business is in good shape for the future. One of the most common mistakes dealerships makes is failing to properly record expenses in the proper month.
This can create various problems, including inaccurate expense allocations and cash flow issues. The best way to keep your company’s books in order is to set a clear and concise goal for your department managers to meet. Your goal should include maintaining accurate and complete financial records that satisfy IRS requirements. Consolidating your accounting functions into one location can help optimize your financial statement production, reduce labor, and provide a more efficient dashboard reporting process. However, you should consider your current technology capabilities and determine whether centralized accounting is the right option for your dealerships before making any changes.
Inventory Control
Accurate accounting practices can help a business keep track of inventory and avoid unnecessary costs such as stockouts or overstocking. These techniques also improve visibility and provide alerts when the current inventory levels are low, or new products need to be added. A good inventory control system can help a business monitor inventory flow through the warehouse, including the location, time, and number of items received or sold. This information can help businesses set effective reorder points and manage inventory effectively, resulting in lower storage and production costs.
In addition, proper inventory control helps businesses maintain the integrity of their records by reducing errors and inaccuracies. This is especially important when a company has many items being processed or shipped.
The correct inventory control system will also provide a good audit trail that allows an accountant to identify any issues or errors in the data and make any needed changes. This will make a dealer’s finances more accurate and ensure that the dealership complies with all financial regulations.
One of the most common errors in inventory control is holding too much stock. This can tie up working capital and cause delays in purchasing and production, which can negatively impact the profitability of a business. Holding too much inventory can be avoided with effective stock control processes that include a FIFO (first in, first out) methodology. This technique keeps older inventory out of the way and prevents it from becoming obsolete before the business can sell it.
