I really wonder what software you use to run your dive centers! I mean it cannot be, in nearly 2010, to still use pen and paper to catch all the thousand processes that happen in a daily dive shop life.
What a drag to find out who did what with whom and when at the end of the month. And who gets paid for what now? Ah yeah, and then someone gets commissions and the customer would like to have an invoice and he needs a place to stay and he wants to rent a bike or one of your kayaks and wants to buy some diving equipment and so on....
But even if you get that all done with a lot of effort and time, you still won't be able to look anything up from the past, without spending a lot of time again... Let alone that there is still no book that can give you any statistics on what has cost how much during the past three month, and how much money did you actually make during that time?? Now if that is hard to tell, how are you going to make a budget plan for the next three month, not really knowing what happened during the past three month?
And what about all the customers that have been diving with you? Do the get a Christmas card? Or a birthday mail? Did you know that up to 10% of the clients that are being remembred by their dive center in this way are coming back, or sending their friends to dive with you? It's a pity that you now can't really tell how many people these 10% actually would be and how much an average diver spends in your dive center; else you could exactly tell about how much money I'm talking here...
Now if you still on the pen and paper side or you work with an excel sheet, you might want to have a look at that new version of
DiveShopManager 2.5 that has just come out. Mighty cool! And it can do all the stuff I was talking about plus a lot more! No the best part is that everybody can try it out for a full month for free and if you don't like it, you can even export all your client data and your financial data to xml and use it elsewhere. Up to now the only thing i found missing on DSM was the Coffee Button!
Let me know what you think!