Mine Your Data – Tracking Revenue Streams

9 Oct 2017

Being based in the North Yorkshire Dales, our area has a rich history of tracking revenue streams – and I mean that in the most literal sense possible. If you trek up into the hills what looks like an idyllic remote landscape is actually the result of intense industrial activity from another era – mining. Iron, lead, copper and minerals were all dug and flushed out of the hills that surround our headquarters. Using a technique called hushing, streams were dammed up until the force of the water pushed the topsoil down the hills, exposing the minerals and ore beneath.

The options facing the mine owners of yesteryear and the business owners of today are largely the same – either put all your revenue from the different mines into one big pot and hope that at the end of the day you make a profit. Or track the income as it comes in on a mine-by-mine basis, so you can see which one is bringing home the money and which is a spent force that is costing rather than generating an income.

There are often cases where you will want to run one branch of the business without making a profit – for example a charitable endeavour whereby you are sponsoring a sports team, without any anticipated or even desired return. For this to be viable you need to be sure that enough financial benefit is being raised elsewhere.

In other cases, you will need to assess the performance of different arms of your business, for example a chain that operates stores in different towns.

As well as seeing which branches are the most successful, drilling down into sales histories will enable the owners to see which goods sell best where – so if need be transferring products from one store to another where supplies are needed. No doubt just like our mining forefathers will have set their best miners and machinery to work on the most productive mines.

Tracking performance at branch or department level in OpenCRM could not be easier. Using a picklist field labeled “Cost Centre” you are able to specify the branch or department or whichever subdivision you wish to measure your sales by. You can run reports based on this information, building up a rich picture of how your different revenue streams are working. Knowing that there’s money to be made up in those hills is one thing – seeing which of the hills is generating the best income for you will help move your business planning to the next level.