ITK assists many dealers today in producing those time consuming but mandatory Factory Submissions for any number of franchises with a tool that is linked and reconciled back to your financial trend. The outcome is a file structured in the format necessary for upload to the various systems in place, to provide the distributor with an accurate account of your business.

Many dealers have chosen to use ITK for factory submissions as ITK gets the jobs done more quickly and easily than traditional methods. It achieves this by visibly showing the profit centres (typically in a trended format for historical comparison), makes the effort of account allocation (and therefore balancing the submission) straight forward, and facilitates the simple, direct entry of memo information to supplement the financial data with any statistical requirement.

Do you currently prepare budgets but rarely compare your projections against actual results? Similarly, do you wonder how your dealership is performing this year compared to prior years or even dealership versus dealership?

Many of our existing ITK clients currently prepare their budget in a workbook inside our ITK product which replicates the departmental structure of your monthly trended reports. You can bring these results together either at the time of your monthly import of your trial balance, or specifically by requesting the ITK Comparative feature on the View menu. In either case, ITK delivers the current Month and Year to date figures to compare the budget results against the dealership achievements. The result is a side by side comparison of current to budget with variance analysis columns in value ($) and/or percentage (%).

Similarly, ITK has the ability to produce the same comparison of actual to prior year. The year end procedure produces a snapshot of your trend which can also be configured to appear in a side by side analysis against you current trend. Our ITK product also has a "comparative" feature that allows you to directly compare two data sets (whether historical data, budget data or a similar location / dealership or franchise).

Have you noticed the Report Wizard option in the “File” menu for ITK and wondered what it was? The Report Wizard is a feature that enables you to deliver any combination of department from any of your ITK workbooks and nominate to either print or email it to one or many recipients. Assume for instance, you want to send the Service Manager the results for the service department only… Report Wizard enables this to be done automatically from within ITK once set up. For a further understanding of this useful feature, please refer to Ann Fabre's more detailed article below.

The ITK engine is capable of delivering many other features including :-
•  Cash Fund - (interpreting your trended Balance Sheet),
•  Graphing - (a dynamic graphing facility that allows you to plot financial's in a clear, graphical format),
•  DOC ITK - (the ability to deliver your ITK formats on a daily basis in a consistent manner)
•  Views - (dynamically “switch” your ITK view from say 12 month trended to Actual / Budget / Variance)

The existing situation that many dealers face is that they simply cannot rely on their existing in-house computer solution alone to give them a daily account of what is happening beyond the trial balance.

For many dealerships, the registering of vehicle orders, writing Finance and Insurance deals, and up-selling Aftermarket products requires  these departmental managers  to maintain a manual record of the event to maintain a status of their overall progress. Our consultations with dealerships show many live examples of an Excel based solution that delivers the eventual message, but the environment suffers from single user access, room for error (through it's high level of manual effort required), and double up of much information already stored on the in-house computer system. There are even many departments today that still use manual ledger books to maintain their deal register.

Our continued effort into the development of latest technology solutions has recently resulted in a successful marriage of Trial Balance, in-house transactional and Order Book Information with an overall solutions that overcomes all of the previous mentioned issues.

Record and measure your variable operations activity with BTWonline

As we continue to deepen the reporting experience of ITKonline by offering new features as we develop them , there has been much interest noted in our BTWonline (Behind the Wheel) product which facilitates an “up to the minute” understanding of all happenings across the variable operations of your businesses. We are finding that dealers who have come on board with both of our ITKonline and BTWonline technologies are benefiting from having the “entire picture” presented to them on a daily basis.

We fully recognize the importance of delivering an up to date picture to the business owners and decision makers. We see it in the dealership everyday in review of the many fantastic efforts that are made by dealers to supplement  pending results along side financial information.

The fact is that up until now, it has really been the realm of Excel that has been able to make this possible for many of you. And as we mention the word Excel, we find ourselves dealing with the cold hard facts of manual entry, single user access and the need to establish “points in time” to ensure that all inputs are collected.

For those of you who share our vision, you directly benefit from the “multi user” and “integrated” natures of our online environments which successfully collaborate the ongoing happenings in the variable operations (Including F&I and After Market) of the business . Additionally, we collect and integrate the information collected from your in-house Motor Dealer System to complete the picture automatically.

The successful collaboration of the up to the minute order book information married to the financial information as it is processed is otherwise known as BTWonline. Please see www.cdsonline.com.au for a refresher on all of the benefits that BTWonline can bring to your organisation.

ITKonline delivering the accurate daily message

What results is the ability for us to give “true” meaning to “Daily Operational Control” for the first time!

In many cases we have sensed initial reluctance from some of our customers in asking them to “let go” of the effort exerted to implement and maintain their existing daily model that had usually been developed over many years requiring continued diligence and effort by key staff at the dealership .

But once they see the end result of a progress report that identifies both information that has already been accounted for alongside that which is being proposed to be delivered, they quickly see the benefits fed back through each manager's positive experience.

What's more, you can choose from having the results pushed (via e-mail) to your management team on a daily basis, and they can subsequently log into our online systems to allow the manager to “fully interrogate” the system to get the meaning behind the numbers.

To take it a step further we incorporate budgets and therefore present a full comparative analysis in the ITKonline environment.


The sample shown here (click here to see enlarged sample) illustrates how powerful the Daily Operational Control offered in ITKonline can be if empowered with both your trial balance detail and BTWonline happenings. A report similar to the one shown here could be e-mailed to your desktop on a daily basis totally empowering you with everything you need to know about the day to day operations of the business. Furthermore your management team can receive similar snapshots that are relevant to that part of the business that is relevant to them. By logging into the ITKonline environment directly from the e-mail, your entire team can then graph or drill through the numbers to see the BTWonline data or the trial balance information behind the analytics.

This level of reporting makes you aware of everything that is going on at the business, and places the onus on your managers to deliver answers and solutions to lack of performance in the knowledge that you have this information at hand.

There is plenty of information available on our web site at www.cdsonline.com.au for you to better understand how these products liberate and empower your entire management team, and we are more than ready to speak with you at your convenience.