Let’s say you have a solid mobile oil change business and you want to make sure you keep track of your customers and keep them from migrating to competitors who put out low-ball coupons or fixed site locations with low-cost come-ons. What’s the best way to do this? Well, not long ago a successful mobile truck repair and oil changing entrepreneur asked me if “there is a program that will help with keeping track of customers, and help keep track of when to send out a flyer/postcard for repeat business.” Turns out the answer; is yes and this is a very good question. Let’s talk shall we?
Yes, there are several “Contact Management Software suites for small businesses” in fact, just search that phrase, better yet there are Apps now that do the same thing, store it all in the cloud and do nearly everything for you, inexpensive service companies, usually they are quite good. Also if you do mobile oil changing there are several companies in the Industry that will do this for you, sometimes the companies that sell you the oil will give you such software, others are Industry Vendors and often at trade shows, but if you don’t have time to go to one, just subscribe to NOLN – National Oil and Lube News; you can find them online because these contact software companies advertise with them.
Also there are such data bases for the auto detailing business and especially nice and sophisticated systems for carwashes. Subscribe to Professional Carwashing Magazine; also online. All these are great places to find the tools to keep track of customers.
Now then, what about integration of this data with financial spread sheets for forecasting and preparing accounting statements and taxes? This was the entrepreneur’s next important question; “What type of financial programs are out there besides Quickin Books. I have used it in the past and I figure there might be a better one out there that I may not know of. What did you use?”
Personally, I like Quicken and QuickBooks a lot, easy to work with and all the CPAs can use this information to help you. However there are Quicken “partners” that are industry specific, which makes it really nice to do spread-sheets, projections, proformas, and forecasting – also building nice P&Ls and Balance Sheets, and other misc. business financial documents. It’s nice to be all-connected, with a data base system including everything, even down to the end user information, of course security is very important for any platform, as you can NEVER allow yourself to be hacked or have a laptop stolen with personal customer information on it – right? Think on this and continued success in your mobile oil change business.
