Honda composite information
Contents
Summary
Honda provide their dealers with a composite input system for performance monitoring. Dealers can monitor the profitability of their dealership in a standard format and see easily the areas where they are successful and the areas that need attention, and compare their figures against the rest of the network. There are two stages of composite available for dealers, depending on how detailed they are able, or want, to make their analysis of their business. Stage One is a simple input document, and Stage Two goes into considerably more detail.
This article will explain the following; a) how to configure your system so that the reporting can provide the data for the input document; b) how to produce the file for input.
More Information
Platinum will provide files to enable you, the dealer, to produce the composite in a straightforward and consistent manner. You will need to configure certain parts of the system carefully to achieve this, but this is no more than you should be doing anyway ! You must have the latest version of Platinum on your system.
Configuring your system
Stages One and Two
You will need to pay attention to the following items.
Vehicle Sales
- Demonstrators, Courtesy and Pre-Registered bikes will need to be indicated. This should be done by using the "Features" tab on the vehicle itself.
- Go to "Vehicle Sales"->"Add or Edit Vehicles".
- Search for the vehicles that are demonstrators, courtesy or pre-registered.
- Double click on the first one, and then click on "Features".
- You will see "Composite" in the list on the left hand side. Click on it.
- In the middle box, you will see the choices as above.
- Click on the appropriate option for this vehicle.
- Press <Esc> and accept the changes made.
Parts
- Hard parts, accessories, clothing, helmets, locks and chains are the categories into which the parts department is broken down for the composite. This should be done by using the Attributes tab on the part number.
- Go to "Stock Control"->"Add or Edit Stock Items".
- Search for the part numbers in which you are interested.
- Double click on the first item, and then click "Attributes".
- You will see "Composite" in the list on the left hand side. Click on it.
- In the middle box, you will see the choices as above.
- Click on the appropriate option for this part number.
- Press <Esc> and accept the changes made.
Accounts
- Your customers need to be broken down into Retail, Internal, Warranty and Trade areas. This should be done by setting the Account Group field on Internal, Warranty and Trade customers - for all Retail customers (the majority hopefully!) the group should be left blank; for the other types use the first three characters of the account type, so this should be 'INT' for Internal, 'WAR' for Warranty, 'TRA' for Trade. Please note that the code must be in capitals.
- If you are using the Platinum Accounts system, you will need to use Division codes on your nominal ledger codes to pull out expenses relating to each department. If your nominal ledger codes do not allow for this, then you either need to change your nominal codes, or carry out a manual exercise to extract the relevant data. If you do not use the Platinum Accounts system, then you will need to extract the expense information separately.
Producing the file
You will be able to produce the file for input both manually and automatically. We would recommend that you produce it via the automatic option, since it avoids any information being missed.
- Log into Platinum on today's date, which should be in the month following the month for which you want to produce your information. To be clear, if you are trying to produce June information for composite, your user date should be anywhere in July.
- Go to "Honda Composite Reports" from your login screen and you will see both the individual reports and the automatic run option. Choose the automatic run option.
- This will run the individual reports and create the input file for you.
- You can view the input file before you import it by double clicking on the file created in the SX folder on your server machine. Be careful if you are making changes here, adding manual information, that you do not touch the data output from Platinum.
