This report opens on your entire store history, not on the current month. Every other report in this section starts you on a recent period; this one starts on everything ARM holds, and SHOW ALL puts you back there. Set a date range before you read any figure from it, or you will be looking at years of trading. It is also the reason for the progress bar — the default range is the slowest one to build.
The table scrolls sideways a long way. There is one row and eighty-three columns, so use the scroll bar under the row and work across in sections. The first column, Store, is a four-digit store number rather than a name, which matters on a group where several stores report together. Everything after it comes in non-fleet and fleet pairs — Oil Changes then Fleet Oil Change, Air Filters then Fleet Air Filters, and so on — with fleet meaning work billed to a fleet account rather than to a walk-in customer.
The row opens with Store Tickets and Store Fleet Tickets, your invoice counts, and then runs through the service categories: Oil Changes, Premium Oil Change, Air Filters, Cabin Filters, Light Bulbs, Wiper Blades, Batteries, Additives, Oil System Cleaner, Tires, Emissions and Other Services, each with its fleet twin. These are sales figures — labour plus parts, less the discount on each line.
After the services come Shop Fees, Fleet Shop Fees, Tire Tax and Fleet Tire Tax.
Other Services is a catch-all and it is usually enormous. Every service type that is not one of the eleven named categories lands in it — brakes, flushes, diagnostics, suspension, anything. In the example it is $394,806.95, second only to Premium Oil Change. If most of your money is in Other Services, that is not a fault; it means most of what you sell has no dedicated column on this report.
Next come the same twelve categories again, this time as COGS — Oil Change COGS, Fleet Oil Change COGS, Premium Oil Change COGS and so on to Fleet Other Services COGS. These are what the parts cost you: the purchase cost of each part times the quantity, plus anything you bought in from a supplier for that job.
COGS on this report is parts only. There is no labour cost in it — not the technician's wage, not a shop rate, nothing. A gross profit worked out from these columns is therefore your parts margin, not your true margin, and it will look far better than the business really is. In the example the whole row shows $1,454,344.63 of sales against $269,879.42 of COGS, an 81% margin that no shop actually earns. Read the categories against each other rather than treating the percentage as real.
After COGS the row turns to fees, discounts and taxes: Penske Commission Deposit, Texas Battery Sales Fee, Coupons, Fleet Coupons, Discounts, Fleet Discounts, Warranties, Gift Certificate Sales, Tax 1 (Sales Tax) through Tax 5, and Fleet Charges. Coupons are the discount taken on the invoice itself; Discounts are group or account discounts applied to labour and parts.
The row finishes with the money: Paid In and Paid Out from the cash drawer, Gift Certificates redeemed, Cash and Checks, Cash and Check OS, Net Cash Deposit, Credit Cards, Fuel Man, Travelers Checks, Beginning Till, Ending Till, Debit Amount, Other, and Shop Fees.
Nine of the eighty-three columns are not connected to anything and always read zero. They are Penske Commission Deposit, Warranties, Tax 2, Tax 3, Tax 4, Tax 5, Cash and Check OS, Fuel Man and Travelers Checks. Do not read them as "we sold no warranties" or "we collected no Tax 2" — the report has nowhere to get those figures from.
There is a way to tell them apart at a glance. A column that is working but has nothing in it prints $0.00, with the dollar sign and the decimals — Additives and Oil System Cleaner do this in the example, and it correctly means none were sold. The nine dead columns print a bare 0 with no dollar sign at all. If you see a plain zero, the column is not implemented; if you see $0.00, you genuinely sold none.
Two different columns are both headed "Shop Fees". The one that appears early, beside Fleet Shop Fees, is your non-fleet shop fees only. The one at the very end of the row is the total of both. In the example the early pair reads $198.16 and $271.96, and the last column reads $470.12 — their sum. Make sure you know which of the two you have scrolled to before quoting it.
Credit Cards is wider than its name. It is built as every payment method except cash, cheque, fleet charge and gift certificate, which means the amounts shown separately in Debit Amount and Other are counted inside it as well. Adding Credit Cards to Debit Amount and Other will double-count. In the example both are $0.00 so it makes no difference, but on a store that takes store-debit payments it will.
A word on what does not appear here. There is no totals row, because the report is already a single row of totals; there is no message when a period has no data, so an empty-looking row means exactly that; and there is no Print. DOWNLOAD gives you the row as a spreadsheet, which is the sensible way to handle eighty-three columns — open it there and read the row down the page instead of scrolling sideways.
