Businesses can ensure more revenue for their car parks without splashing out. There can be a lot of income to save and make from managing reconciliations and utilising car parking spaces. This profitable line of revenue can also increase the value of your car park and deliver a better service to customers.
But what does a business need to do to start profiting from additional income from their car parking spaces? There are three main ways in which to do this:
- Secure Reconcile Process to save any losses in exceptions and track cash flow
- Monitor Performance and Revenue through parking analytics
- Physical Changes & Partnership options
Across a range of sectors, optimisation of your car park creates more revenue. There’s more to managing a car park than merely filling up spaces, those ensuring the smooth running must guarantee they’re doing their utmost to generate revenue streams and maximise the profit potential. Additionally, to guarantee complete revenue management, tracking the cash flow, digital app payments and monitoring analytics.
Have you considered utilising your car park as a revenue generator?
There are multiple methods managers can use to optimise car parks to reduce costs and increase revenues. From sensor lighting and automated number plate recognition to subcontracting spaces for weekends and significant events. So, suppose you’re looking to increase profits. Below is tips on your car park operations and driving down costs.
Secure Reconciliation Process
Ensuring a robust reconciliation process of digital, cash, and third-party payment apps such as RingGo is crucial. Primarily, for guaranteeing no revenue losses through exceptions. A secure reconciliation process would provide transparency and full tracking of all audit receipts. This would allow you to identify if there are losses in revenue through various reasons such as faulty machines, app system errors or theft/loss.
Many car parking managers put their complete trust in apps such as RingGo to provide their transaction reconciliation data without any validating done first-hand. This could be a major issue if any faults occur in RingGo’s system. Highlighted recently with the Horizon scandal where the system generated faults and recording errors. Ultimately, costing the client detrimentally. Therefore, validating all revenue, cash, card, and payments made through service providers such as car parking payment apps is essential. Doing this will ensure you are not encountering any losses and could save a lot of money; if you lose revenue daily, weekly monthly, imagine what this could amount to in years.
Greater financial control and improved compliance
An organisation that does not have automated and integrated reconciliation processes in place will fail to have an accurate and up-to-date view of its finances, leaving it open to poor financial control and compliance issues.
Sonas, an all-in-one reconciliation solution, ensures accurate recording, validation, consolidation and reporting of financial information. The entire reconciliation process is tracked from start to finish in real-time by scanning audit receipts in real-time.
Monitor performance and revenue through parking analytics
Ensuring a robust overview of your car park through analytics will allow for data-driven decisions. Reporting can provide insights into many vital performance indicators:
- The amount of revenue your car park is generating
- The number of losses in exceptions
- The breakdown of revenue by payment method
- Income by location
- Income by month
Understanding these crucial factors is critical for a successful revenue-generating car park. For example, understanding the number of losses in exceptions would allow you to investigate if there is an issue with a faulty machine. Alternatively, a third-party app issue or problems with your cash management provider and ultimately save on revenue losses.
In addition to this, if you understand the breakdown of revenue by payment method, it will allow you to make smart decisions. For Example, additional car parking machines or implementing more digital payment methods.
Income by month or location would allow you to forecast busy months and perhaps capitalise on this. Perhaps by increasing the rates or creating additional temporary parking.
Data-Driven Decisions
Understanding the amount of revenue your car park generates provides provides key indications. Such as whether the car park utilises its capacity and whether it should be expanded or reduced. Alternatively, are the car park rates too low.
In determining your own car park’s rates, you’ll likely have researched the rates and capacities of competing car parks and how much drivers are willing to pay. Since rates can be unpredictable, you risk falling behind in the competition if you don’t conduct your research and monitor what’s going on.
For instance, the reports might show your car park is at total capacity during the day. Notably. while primary research shows surrounding car parks are empty. While that sounds like good news, it could also be a sign that your rates are too low, and your customers are heading there because you’re the cheapest option. Therefore, understanding this information would allow you to increase rates and revenue while staying competitive.
Conversely, if your reports show low revenue and space is looking empty, your rates might be too high and dropping them could attract new business activity and revenues. The focus either way is on capitalising on revenue through more parkers by understanding the operations of your car parks.
Physical Changes & Partnership Opportunities
It’s not just working hours in which your revenue has the opportunity to thrive. You can use the popular restaurants, hotels, and other places of interest in a city. Talk with the owners of surrounding businesses to source partnership opportunities with you as a parking option. If they’re interested, there are plenty of opportunities to provide incentives, such as discounts on parking for larger groups.
Additionally, suppose your car park is mostly empty at night. It may be useful to partner with hotels that do not have car parks for overnight parking to generate additional income.
Further, adjusting the layout of your car park, ensuring your car park is easy to navigate and an easy experience will provide higher volumes of parkers.
Overall
Overall, ensuring you do not lose any revenue through unmanaged reconciliations and exceptions, understanding your parking analytics, exploring partnership opportunities, providing a user-friendly car park layout, and monitoring KPIs will increase revenue