What Makes Our Approach to Accounting Unique?
Before discussing the six ways we can help you succeed we wanted to provide a little context about what makes us different from other accounting firms and/or your internal bookkeeping. PCO Bookkeepers’ accounting service is anchored to three items that make us unique:
Business Domain Expertise – PCO Bookkeepers understands the pest control industry. Before founding PCO Bookkeepers, our managing partners launched, grew, scaled and sold multiple pest control businesses. As an accounting firm we serve over 300 clients nationwide. We are the largest and only accounting firm that specializes specifically in serving pest control companies.
Benchmarks and Pest Control Industry Best Practice Financials – Our firm, client managers and accountants currently work with hundreds of pest management companies on a daily basis. In fact, our clients represent $600 million in annualized pest revenue. What that means is, if you exclude Terminix, Orkin and Rentokil, we are running 10% to 15% of all the revenue in the U.S. market through our accounting firm. This allows us to anonymously combine a lot of really interesting data that you can benchmark yourself against, on a monthly basis, including all the critical metrics required for success.
Technology Expertise – We know routing software for the industry. We work with PestPac, PestRoutes, ServSuite, Real Green and several others. We actually get into those programs and optimize their integration with QuickBooks. This allows us to offer streamlined and flexible CFO services, accounts payable services, tax preparation and audit representation services, budgeting and exit planning, and brokerage services with streamlined operational expertise.
This combination of talent, data and technology allows us to be able to help our clients succeed and sustain profitability in multiple ways. The rest of this short article will provide a quick overview of how this combination can help your business thrive.
How We Help You Succeed and Sustain Profitability
1. Increased Financial Visibility Monthly
Running a business often requires owners to carefully plan and review their finances. Most companies use some form of periodic reporting for identifying, measuring, analyzing, and reporting their financial information. PCO Bookkeepers recommends that if you’re in it to win it, you should be looking at financial reports at least monthly and operational reports more often than that. It’s a way to keep score in the game of business.
The first step in providing you the increased visibility you need is to provide you with three critical monthly reports. The two foundational reports are the balance sheet and the profit and loss statement. The third is our proprietary profitability ratios report.
The single most important ratio we help you track on a monthly basis is the gross profit percentage. Best-in-class pest control companies typically show at least a 50% to 55% gross profit. This profitability ratio allows you to pay off the other expenses or the operating expenses to run a healthy business. This approach allows you to run your business like a manufacturing process.
Quick Demo of Monthly Dashboard and Benchmark Reports
PCO Bookkeepers Provides Customized Monthly Reporting, Goal, and Competitive Dashboard Reporting Based on Industry Best Practices
2. We Help You Track Cash Flow
Cash is the like the blood that circulates through your body. If you don’t have enough blood you can’t run. And if you want to grow you need to know where you have cash you can invest. Without cash flow visibility you are really blind in terms of things that you can do for growth and things that you can do to keep your business afloat.
A cash flow statement provides a clear picture of how and when money flows into and out of your business over a long period of time. Preparing your business’s first cash flow statement is a time-consuming process. But because we understand the Pest Control Industry and because we understand routing software we are uniquely positioned to craft and manage meaningful cash flow reports quickly. Once this report is created, it will allow you to make more intelligent decisions especially when combined with our monthly benchmark report and the eight critical profitability ratios we help you track.
3. 8 Critical Profitability Ratios
With our expertise in routing software, we are also able to help you pull data directly from this software and combine it with your financial data to give you visibility into 8 critical profitability ratios. These are the ratios that impact your gross profit. They are:
– Days Sales in A/R
– Revenue Per Employee
– Revenue Per Technician
– Revenue Per Customer
– Office to Production
– Skip Percentage
– Cancel Percentage
– Tech Utilization
The ratios are critical because they allow you to find opportunities for growth and opportunities for savings.
Eight Key Profitability Ratios
Here is an educational webcast on the eight critical ratios you can impact to increase your profitability.
4. Competitive Benchmark Reports
If you’ve ever played fantasy baseball or football, you know that each Monday morning you look at what your team did, you know the players and how they performed. The eight critical profitability ratios above are your individual player and unit scores.
We then provide benchmarks for best practices across 300 similar businesses. This allows you to compare yourself to the competition. This combined with your cash flow analysis allows you to make moves to more effectively compete and win.
5. Budgets
Budgets are your road map to realize your goals. Once we have customized your…
– Financial reports
– Benchmark reports
– Profitability ratios
…and we have integrated QuickBooks with your routing software, we can assist you with several types of budgets.
To create your budgets, we look at your historical data and we forecast sales/retention data against your revenue goals. We can then align your operational budget against those goals to align your expenses to your goals. From there the rest of it is a puzzle that we put together with you based on your financial goals. These goals typically fall into three categories:
– Increased profitability
– Growth
– Prepare for a sale
They could also be any combination of these or all three.
Once we understand your goals, we can start to offer guidance. We can tell you where you need to focus expenditures. We can help you understand how many trucks you are going to need, how much fuel is going to be required, how much chemical costs will increase or decrease. Now that you have a complete picture for growth based on the established goals you create, on a monthly basis you will be able to see:
– Your budget vs. your actuals
– The variance – both where you succeeded and where you stumbled
6. Free Consulting
Because we have streamlined your visibility, reporting and analysis (so your data tells you a story) we also can help you take action on those insights. We’re always only a phone call away and always willing to talk about your strategic financial decisions. There are multiple areas in which we have a great deal of business domain expertise and where we can provide insights. Some of the areas our clients tap us for first are:
Sales and marketing – Using our benchmarks, we can tell you what your cost of sales percentage and cost of marketing per lead should be.
Optimizing Routes – Leveraging your software, we can help you optimize the cost per technician by using better routes.
Product Packaging – Helping you to create streamlined service packages to create more annual recurring revenue.
Smooth Monthly Revenues – Helping to mitigate the effects of seasonality.
Developing Management Compensation Plans – Helping to create compensation plans for employees that incentivize performance.
On Demand Webcast – Watch Now
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This OnDemand Webcast shares the details of how you can leverage data and insights to ensure your business survives and thrives
Summary
PCO Bookkeepers provides you with all the cost savings and peace of mind of an accounting firm but because of our specialization in the Pest Control Industry, we provide exponential value to any Pest Control Company.
Our reports are designed with the PCO business owner or manager in mind. They can be fully customized to fit your Pest Control Company needs and show how you measure up against other pest control businesses in the industry.
Whether you are trying to manage a rapidly expanding business, trying to protect your profit or looking for new ways to grow a pest control business, we can help. We are obsessed with providing pest control companies the information they need to grow in today’s competitive environment. PCO Bookkeepers deploys a unique approach to managing a pest control company for growth.
We help you configure your company for success, focusing on developing and maintaining healthy, accurate operational systems that enable your business to grow. You only pay for what you need and we offer a full range of solutions to ensure the right fit for your business. These solutions include:
– Accounting, Booking and CFO Services
– Accounts Payable
– Budgeting
– Tax Preparation and Planning
– Brokerage Services and Mergers & Acquisition Support.
