Crack the Code to Reducing Your Expenses

Over time, business owners learn to expect the unexpected as they work tirelessly to grow their business in a constantly changing world. Especially in the case of small businesses, lack of insight into where the money your business brings in is being spent, dollar for dollar, can be detrimental to your bottom line. Getting your expenses under control can seem like a problem too big to tackle in the midst of day-to-day production, but it’s a necessary step all owners must take to increase efficiencies and optimize their overall business capabilities.

Having a comprehensive understanding of your expenses makes you not only a better owner but also a better leader. Visibility and understanding of your operational costs, inefficiencies and other areas for improvement, including safe driving behavior and vehicle health, are critical to managing your business and improving operational processes more effectively. The saying often goes that you can’t track what you don’t measure. The ability to gather data automatically and get insights into inefficiencies empowers you to make changes in areas that will make the most impact.

Telematics solutions have functionalities, beyond simply the ability to track your vehicles, designed to help you optimize your fleet operations for increased productivity and efficiency, helping you make the most out of your investment and hang on to your profits.

As you try to crack the code to your own operational costs, here are a few signs of inefficiencies you may come across and the key solutions to cracking them and making their negative impact a thing of the past. 

Unexpected maintenance costs

Unreliable equipment and delayed or missed appointments can lead to a reputation that your business is unreliable to current and potential customers. Being proactive about equipment maintenance helps to mitigate the risk of breakdowns that can make your productivity suffer.

Setting up scheduled maintenance alerts for each piece of your equipment your business depends on, whether motorized or not, is an easy step owners can take to minimize downtime and slowdowns in productive hours in the days of your workers. By scheduling maintenance around your workday minimizes the impact on your productivity even more.

Unpaid invoices

Though invoices may seem to actually have more to do with income than expenses, invoices that go unpaid are a top pain point especially for businesses that sell services and requires operational expense to seek out payment. Enabling your field employees to invoice customers and receive payments directly on site helps minimize the occurrence of unpaid invoices. This not only helps alleviate the challenge of variances between money that’s expected to come in and what’s actually in your bank account, it also relieves your back office staff of tracking down historical records and the headache of contacting customers who have outstanding balances, which lowers your office staff payroll expenses. Automated digital invoicing also alleviates the headaches of paper recordkeeping.

Job hours not adding up

A major expense for any business is payroll. Timesheets created without a reliable data set to fact check against put your business at risk for incurring additional unjustifiable payroll payments. Inaccuracies, even on a small scale, on a regular basis can eventually lead to significant, unreclaimable cost for your business. Trust with your employees is critical, and though  a system to help track hours worked accurately and automatically can appear at first to betray such trust, it can actually bolster the relationship by creating a data-based record, where any discrepancy can easily be supported by objectively data. The ability to rely on data also helps prevent leaving your business exposed to fraud and financial risk.

Uptick in insurance payments

There are many steps in your daily business operation, including tracking driver behavior and habits, that give you the context to have a constructive conversation with your insurance provider to better understand the ins and outs of your premiums. Additionally, data demonstrating your efforts to improve driver behavior and reduce accidents give your provider insight into where discounts could be available or how lower premiums for your business could be negotiated. Read more about an HVAC company lowered insurance premiums for by adding a telematics solution to help monitor the habits of its workers.

The real secret to cracking this code to your expenses is no secret: you need to gain better insight into what you’re paying for and why. Though it can be overwhelming for a manager or business owner to monitor the day-to-day costs of running a business, ignoring or assuming fleet-related costs are in order exposes your business to risk, especially when the livelihoods of your employees are on the line. Minor adjustments to your daily operations by setting up a telematics solution to automate processes and data gathering can swiftly help you control costs to save time and money to reinvest in your business. Getting better visibility into your business needs to be a priority if you want to succeed in the highly competitive marketplace.