Well, we’re not too sure how it snuck up on us so quickly, but it’s just around the corner – the end of the financial year!
Although it often means plenty of long days getting all your paperwork and reporting in order (and a subsequent spike in caffeine consumption!), it also presents a wealth of opportunities for self storage owners to tidy up arrears, organise rental increases, rationalise any discounts you’ve been offering, or refinance any loans the business has taken out. Essentially, it’s the best time of year to ensure your business is getting the most bang for your buck – and ending up with more bucks in the bank!
The end of the financial year can pose some challenges for self storage businesses who are not running purpose-built management software, or software that was not designed with the Australian market in mind.
We see some common end of financial year headaches for facilities not running purpose-built management systems such as Storman Cloud. Reconciling income may rely on a delicate ecosystem of spreadsheets, accommodating and writing off bad debts can be a difficult and manual process, and it can be difficult to gain a holistic overview of the business.
So how can Storman Cloud help?
Your management software for your self storage facility should ideally make your life simpler in a lot of ways, but there are a few particular features within Storman Cloud that come in especially handy as EOFY creeps up – whether it’s financial reporting and management, or helping you manage and maximise your revenue!
1. Tidy up arrears, write off bad debts – and potentially reduce your tax bill.
The end of the financial year gives you a chance to assess some of your arrears and overdue debts for storage rental, and explore which of those may be able to be written off against your taxable income – hopefully resulting in a smaller tax bill!
Storman Cloud offers you a range of easy ways to contact your customer and try and bring the account up to date if they have fallen behind, but unfortunately, there are some occasions when these measures just don’t work. In these cases, you can opt to easily write off the bad debt within Storman Cloud (see our knowledge base article on how to do so here!), and claim a tax deduction against your income – a silver lining to every cloud!
2. Spring-clean your discount programs.
This time of year is also a great time for you to tidy up your discount programs and ensure they’re working for you, rather than against you. For example, you may offer 10% off, but it may be more cost effective for you to provide a storer with their twelfth month free. This has the added bonus of getting more of a commitment from the storer – rather than just raking in the benefits of a discounted unit price, they need to actually stay with your facility for 11 months in order to get the twelfth free.
Good management software will take some of the legwork out of this for you, and minimise the risk of ‘setting and forgetting’. For example, Storman Cloud allows you to configure a discount plan to run for a set period of time and then revert to a standard rate. This presents you with an opportunity to renegotiate with the customer, and perhaps even get a commitment for another year – after all, it’s easier (and cheaper) to keep a customer than find a new one!
3. Accurate, easy to understand metrics and financial information – where and when you need it.
The end of the financial year can be a great time to consider your next steps as a business – whether it’s refinancing your existing loan, or perhaps taking out a new loan to build an extension or otherwise invest.
It’s important that your software can give you accurate, easy to understand reports on your business’s finances to ensure you have complete oversight of your business’s financials and put you in the best possible position to negotiate. Dedicated self storage management software will allow you to back your financial reports up with ‘big picture’ information – for example, you may wish to showcase your large customer base and the fact that you have a very long average tenure & very low attrition to underline that you’re a low-risk lendee. Storman Cloud will provide you with this information – and plenty more!
Ideally to aid in all this, your software will also provide clear yield and rent roll numbers with just a few clicks, and give you the ability to export straight to accounting packages like MYOB, QuickBooks, and Xero.
