If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.

Knowing what’s going on inside a business is critical to its success. Being able to track and analyse the numbers enables managers to identify growth opportunities, highlight looming deficits and make informed decisions.

Finance teams are usually all over income and expenditure reporting, but operational information delivers the detail that explains ‘why’. Auditable data on your customers, their boats and the services you sell them will support short and long term planning.

Are you expanding your customer base or selling more to the same people? Is occupancy declining because boats are getting bigger? Do you need one or two extra staff in the summer?

A good manager balances first-hand experience with real-time data and long-term trends.

Day-to-day reporting

Having a suite of ready-to-go reports that are available at the click of the mouse makes every marina team’s job easier.

Print a daily arrivals and departures list, quickly see who owes what (then chase the debt), identify overstayers, check expired insurance documents and track occupancy.

Use standard housekeeping reports to tidy-up incomplete payment allocations or customers missed from the renewal run.

Plan future bookings around occupancy, events, staff leave or scheduled maintenance.

“The expired documents report is amazing for tracking out-of-date insurance details.” Bvlgari Yacht Club, Dubai

Visibility and clarity

There’s no point waiting for quarterly reports during a six-month summer season – if the numbers are down, you need to know to put a recovery plan into place now. Reporting needs to be real-time, so managers can track daily or weekly activity.

Data becomes auditable if every staff member has a unique login, and the system captures every action. There’s a trail.

You can see who took the order, when the customer opened the email and how the order was paid. It’s easy to drill-down on recurring errors and identify that staffer in need of a bit of extra training.

“It gives us visibility, so issues get actioned faster.” Lakeland Leisure

Standard reports

Harbour Assist has 48 standard reports covering aged debtors, payments, sales leads and orders, credit notes, deferred revenue, renewals, compliance, licensing, occupancy and operations. Run any report for any period using a simple calendar picker – a day, calendar month or between any two dates.

Reporting suite

Multi-site operators can choose whether site managers can view and report on each other’s sites or not. While visibility can be useful for benchmarking, it can be more valuable to provide reporting centrally, with a narrative.

Presentation and analysis

Print the report to use on a dock walk check or circulate to the team as a PDF. Export to Excel for more detailed analysis, to present as graphs or to combine multiple data sources into a custom spreadsheet.

Larger and more complex operators can manipulate and interrogate real-time data in Microsoft Power BI to create a bespoke graphic dashboard and drill-down data sets.

Reporting is more than revenue in minus expenditure out. Accurate, timely numbers support both smooth day-to-day operations and long-term strategy.

How can we help your business?

If you’d like to talk about how Harbour Assist can help you see what’s going on in your business,  email Nick direct [email protected]