Last issue we discussed ways to instill a positive company culture while reeling in flighty or prima donna attitudes by utilizing your biggest asset – the passenger seat of your service vehicles. This issue we’re going to shift gears a bit and talk about keeping an eye on your other assets like tools, materials and most importantly – your customers. With any business, there are just as many ways to lose money as there are to make money (if not more). Not keeping track of company inventory can be costing you a lot more money than you may realize. It’s more important to keep track of dollars, costs and revenue now as ever.

While we never want to assume the worst and expect our employees to do what’s right while out in the field, but the reality is things can happen to cost your business money in tools, materials, missed opportunities and even customers. Without regularly tracking what inventory is on your trucks, you’re not able to know what, how much or the dollar value of anything that may be missing.

It’s easy to lose $125 or more in materials per service truck per week. Either materials or company bought tools get left behind at the work site, broken through misuse or abuse – or worse, used in a side job your tech picked up while out on a call.
This $125 figure doesn’t factor in any lost opportunity costs from your employees taking on outside work. Let’s assume that average ticket for a service call is $325 and you have a “problem tech” who’s taking on 2-3 jobs per week after hours – but using company materials for his work. Now your lost revenue skyrockets to nearly $1000 per week. Factor in the cost of materials used, tools left behind, vehicle gas and you’re losing $50,000 a year.

Implementing a regularly scheduled count of what’s actually on your trucks versus what you’ve purchased to be on those trucks will flag any discrepancies and allow you the opportunity to hunt down and hopefully squash the reason for any missing tools or supplies.

Another technique for ensuring all earned dollars staying in your company is using numbered invoices for recording all jobs. Send your techs out in field with a specific number of sequentially numbered invoices and have them return them all at the end of the day, along with any explanations for missing invoices. This makes it
impossible for that problem tech taking on side jobs to overcharge a cash-paying client on-site, and then rewriting a lesser invoice to submit to the company allowing him to pocket the difference.