Crucial Data To Have At Your Fingertips – Training Company Edition

Crucial Data To Have At Your Fingertips – Training Company Edition
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Summary: We take you through all the data a training company needs to have access to at all times, and how you can use Administrate to store and view that data!

LMS Reporting And Measurement For Training Companies

Reporting is really important for training companies, and a huge part of reporting is making sure you have the right data available, so you can create accurate and useful reports. Not having all the data you need right at your fingertips can mean you end up spending a lot of extra time having to hunt down all the data you need, possibly from a number of different sources. Not only will all this extra work take a lot of time itself, but you may need to wait for people to respond to you, which adds even more time to the task.

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Even worse than this, you may end up compiling reports that don’t accurately represent the current state of your business if you decide to just go ahead and create a report when you don’t have all the data. Not only will these reports be pretty useless, they’re a waste of your time, and a waste of time for anyone who has to read them or try and draw any useful conclusions from them.

So, what’s the solution? In order to avoid all these problems, and create the most amazing and detailed reports your business could possibly dream off, you need to keep all your information in one place! Sounds simple doesn’t it? Well, that’s because it is!

There’s a few ways you can make sure all your vital information is exactly where you need it, when you need it, but obviously we think the best way to achieve this is by using Administrate! You can use Administrate to either give you a real-time overview of specific areas of data, depending on which screen you are looking at, or to pull the data into reports to compare it, either from different areas of Administrate or from a different time period.

As a training company, there is a lot of data that you’ll need to have right at your fingertips in order to always have a clear picture of how your courses and business as a whole is running. Let’s take a run through some of the most important data you should have access to at any given moment, and how you can use Administrate to store, view and, use all this vital data.

Financials

Keeping an eye on the financial side of your business is obviously a hugely important factor for any training company. Having lots of figures and sums to do can make the financial side of things seem quite daunting, but Administrate is here to make it as easy as possible to get an overview of how you are performing financially. All the data in Administrate is updated in real-time, so you can get an exact picture of your financials at any given moment.

Sales Opportunities

Unless you work directly in or with the Sales team, chances are you might not have the full picture when it comes to your business’s sales pipeline. Administrate’s Sales Opportunities System will not only show you what deals you have closed over a certain period, but it can also show you what deals your Sales team has in the works. This can give you a good indicator of potential course sales in the future, which will help with your forecasting.

Using the Sales Opportunities System will also allow you to see how individual sales people and the Sales team as a whole are performing without having to spend a lot of time trying to track all the deals that have been sold or proposed for a certain time period.

The sales pipeline allows you to quickly see any open opportunities, closed opportunities, the projected value of any deals, as well as the amount of projected wins your Sales team has secured. This basically allows you to report on your entire Sales team with very little legwork, which can give you a much better insight into the upcoming deals your training company is hopefully going to close. You can also pull all this data into a sales pipeline report, if you really want to drill into the data, or compare it to previous datasets.

Marketing ROI (Return on Investment)

Sometimes, it can be hard to know exactly how beneficial your marketing activities are. You can decide what marketing tasks you want to perform, and keep plodding along with them, but unless you’re taking the time to measure how beneficial they are, you could just be wasting a lot of time and money, as well as not giving yourself the chance to improve your marketing activities in the future.

In Administrate’s marketing system, you can actually track your ROI on any marketing campaigns you create. When you set up a specific campaign you can define your budget and track your spending, allowing you to track your ROI as you go along. You can also enter your goals in terms of responses, leads and actual sales, so you can see directly how your marketing budget converts to sales at the end of the process.

Event Costs

Event Costs are important because they can help you calculate the profitability of your events, as opposed to just the revenue. Costs can cover things like venue hire costs, catering costs, or printing costs for course materials.

You can also set the costs to apply where they are needed such as fixed costs (costs that only happen once per event, such an venue costs), everyone (costs that apply to everyone on the event and will go up incrementally depending on how many people are associated with the event), personnel (costs that only apply to number of personnel for the event), and students (costs that only apply to the number of students for the event). This means Administrate does all the calculations for you, and you never need to worry about muddling up those important numbers!

A quick glance at any event will allow you to see your invoiced revenue, forecasted revenue, invoiced costs, and forecasted costs at a glance, and will also display your profit underneath, so you will always have a clear idea of how much money each event is making in real-time.

All this information is also displayed right at the top of the screen in each event, so it’s really quick and easy to see how your revenue and costs are adding up to affect your profit.

Sales Ledger

The Sales Ledger feature within Administrate gives you the ability to view all the sales invoices and orders that have been created.

The data is displayed by month and allows you to see each invoice or order, along with when it was created, if the payment has been received, and how much the payment was worth, all in one handy screen. Obviously, you can click on each invoice individually to drill down even further into the data, but the Sales Ledge allows you a quick overview of all your invoices without having to search through lots of individual invoices to gather the data yourself.

You can also filter the data, so the Sales Ledger will only display the data you need to focus on, and then download it as an Excel file if you need to.

Events And Resources

In order to stay super organized, you need to have a full picture of what’s going on with your events and your resources at all times. With courses getting booked all the time, and resources getting booked onto events, this data will be changing constantly, so you’ll want a solution that displays all the information in real-time, so you’re not working a step behind. Administrate’s Events System offers lots of different ways to display all the data relating to all your events, or single events, so you can always find the data you need.

Event Tasks

Event tasks are reminders you can set up in Administrate for each event to enable you to run that event successfully. These could be different for every type of event you run, but they are all vitally important to make sure that event goes off without a hitch.

You can add a single task, which is a one-off task for a specific event, or create a workflow, which are set up to be applied to all your events. Workflows are perfect for routine tasks that you need to do for each event, such as organizing catering or collecting course feedback after a course has finished.

Once you’ve set your tasks up, they’ll appear right on your homepage, so you never forget about anything important you need to do! Not only that, we send you a daily task reminder email, so every morning you can get a reminder of exactly what you still have left to do, and can plan your day accordingly.

Future Events

Knowing all the events you have coming up in the future is central to any planning you will be doing. You need to know what events are happening and when, so you can allocate things like tutors (without overloading them or leaving them twiddling their thumbs), venues, equipment, etc.

You can also create a future events report , so you can quickly display all your future events for anyone to view. Or you may want to take a cross section of events, for a particular instructor for example, and create of report of these, so your audience only has to look at the data that is relevant to them.

Event Resources

If you have resources which you use for certain events, such as laptops, projectors, books, etc., then it’s important to make sure you keep track of them at all times. The last thing you want is to be running 3 classes at the same time which all require a projector, when you only have one projector available.

Administrate can help you keep track of all your resources so this never happens, and you know well in advance if you need to seek additional resources or maybe reschedule a class to make sure it runs properly.

Once you’ve logged all your available resources in Administrate, you’ll be able to view a complete list of which resources you have, where they are based, and if they are in service or not. You can also click on an individual resource and see all the events it is allocated to in the future.

Alternatively, you can view individual events and see all the resources that have been allocated to that event in one place. This can be especially handy if you’re the one in charge of setting up the course before it begins, as you can get a full list of everything that needs to be brought along and set up.

To prevent the risk of duplication, Administrate won’t allow you to assign a resource to an event when it’s already been booked somewhere else, so you can rest easy that all your resources are organised and where they should be!

Class Fill-Rate

Knowing how full or empty your classes are is really important, because you want to make sure you are running your business as profitably as possible. You don’t want to be running 3 different versions of the same class that are all severely under capacity, when you could just be running one larger class instead. This would save you forking out for 3 venues and 3 tutors when you could just condense these classes into one. Conversely, you may have a class that is always fully-booked, so you may consider putting on additional sessions in order to increase your revenue.

Administrate’s event list will give you an overview of all the events you have entered into the system, as well as showing you how many students are booked on, have reserved a place, and are interested in the course. You can then compare this against how many spaces there are available on the course to see what the fill-rate is.

So, Why Use Administrate?

One of our favourite parts of the Administrate system is the fact you can keep track of everything and store all your important information in one place. Once all your data is entered, it’s so quick and easy to find whatever you need. Having this data so easily accessible and being able to use it to pull together reports in seconds is pretty much impossible to do without Administrate!

Here’s how you can use Administrate to stay organized and keep track of everything:

Document Management System

Our Document Management System (DMS) is designed so you can file and find all your important documents from one central point, instead of having vital files scattered across a number of different people’s computers and inboxes. If you’re worried about who gets to see what, you can set up permissions based on user roles for certain documents. This means you don’t have to squirrel specific documents away if they need to stay private, you can still keep everything together, so it doesn’t get confusing and you don’t risk losing those extra important files.

Our DMS means you never have to use paper files, shared documents, or spreadsheets ever again. You’ll never have to worry about misplacing something important, or accidentally shredding that report that was sitting on your desk. Everything is stored in one place, and everyone who needs to can access in an instant, anywhere they can get online!

Pull Data Into Reports

As we’ve mentioned above, having all the important data you need at your fingertips will make your life much easier, and Administrate’s ability to pull any of the stored data you have into a report means much less legwork for you. Administrate lets you build custom reports , so you’re always compiling the exact data you need – no dealing with pre-sets here! Just select exactly the data fields you require, as well as how you want them to be displayed, and you’ll have a beautiful report produced in seconds. You can also save the report, send it to whoever needs to see it, and set up a schedule so it will be sent out to the recipients at certain times, so they will always have the most up-to-date data available.

Back-Up

Storing all your data in Administrate is much more secure than having it saved on your computer. Because Administrate is cloud-based, your entire operation is run from some of the best data centres in the world. All your data is backed-up nightly and stored in secure data storage facilities, meaning your entire operation is backed up, safe, and secure. Want to know more about how much you can trust us? Check out our trust in Administrate guide for more information!

All of our features are designed to save you as much time as possible, so you can focus on more important things than loads of training admin. Just think what you could do with all that extra time? Administrate will allow you to reinvest all the time you save to be even more productive, which can only have a positive effect on your ROI!

Originally published at www.getadministrate.com.