Running an RV park is demanding. Between ensuring camper satisfaction, focusing on operational excellence, and managing your staff, you have too many tasks you need to accomplish.
One of the tasks you need to stay on top of as a park manager is accounting and expenses. To ensure you're maximizing profitability at your business, it's essential to reduce costs. Fortunately, your RV park software can help you do just that. Here's what to consider.
Whether creating your first RV park business plan or updating your budget, you need to consider all expenses, including the cost of your RV park management software. Here are three factors to consider when researching software for a start-up business or looking for a platform more suitable for your needs.
Scalable. Make sure the solution is scalable so it can match your needs as your business scales.
Bundled technologies. Select a platform that meets all of your business needs. Look for a comprehensive solution that includes revenue management, point-of-sale (POS), channel management, and other features beyond just booking.
Features and tools for expense management. The best RV park management software will include features and tools that can significantly reduce your expenses. Let’s take a look at six ways you can minimize costs when you make the right selection.
Time is money, and repetitive, time-consuming tasks eat away at both. To reduce wasted dollars, make sure your RV park software solution allows you to automate processes.
Some of the best processes to automate include:
Leveraging automation that may be available in your park management software improves operational efficiency, reduces payroll, and reduces the risk of errors. All of these benefits lead to expense reduction.
Insight into cash flow and expense management lets you make business decisions based on fact instead of guesswork. Visibility into real-time data can be the key to survival during challenges such as the recent pandemic or potential economic downturns. Selecting the right RV park management software allows you to access the business insights you need.
Ensure that your solution offers comprehensive pre-defined reports that you are able to customize for your unique needs. Additionally, automating scheduled reports with the ability to save favorites on your dashboard will remind you to actively manage your cash flow.
The historical data provided by business intelligence tools will help you forecast expenditures for expected future bookings and identify specific expenses to reduce.
In addition to financial reports, property utilization reports are an important tool to reduce costs. Here are two specific examples:
Maintenance and improvements. Utilization reports show which RV spaces are used most frequently and let you predict when they might be empty. This allows you to allocate maintenance and improvement dollars where they will have the most impact.
Utility expense. Property utilization reports can help you catch utility irregularities and avoid potential losses of hundreds or thousands of dollars.
When researching RV park booking software, ensure that the channel management tool — if available — includes channel performance reporting.
Because of the numerous channels' fees, a best practice is to identify the best and worst-performing channels and match those to the fees charged. This allows you to nurture the well-performing channels for higher revenue while eliminating any channels that don’t meet your gross profit threshold.
Another way to reduce fees paid to channel vendors is to increase direct bookings in proportion to your total reservations. When more campers use a “Book Now” button directly on your website, you increase revenue and reduce OTA fees.
However, ensure the Internet Booking Engine (IBE) on your website updates reservations and space availability in your RV park booking software in real time. If a dynamic pricing tool is included in a comprehensive platform, website visitors will see accurate availability and pricing information. Your guests will benefit, and you will also see savings through reduced OTA fees.
Many RV park business plans include a significant budget for paid advertising. While this can be an effective strategy, the cost adds up.
Email marketing can both boost direct marketing and save on expensive paid advertising. There are email types that you might not consider to be marketing tools, such as confirmation, pre-arrival, or post-check-out emails. However, when you use an effective email marketing strategy that combines those types of emails along with newsletters, abandoned cart emails, and nurture emails, you can save on advertising.
Understanding how you can reduce costs doesn’t answer the question of which solution is the best RV park management software to help you achieve this goal.
While considering your many expenses, you also need a comprehensive software solution that enables you to deliver an exceptional camper experience, streamline all of your operations, and unlock your business potential.
Our Reservation Software Vendor Comparison Guide evaluates RV park software to help you decide which solution is ideal for your property. These features are compared:
Download the guide today and compare Campspot, Firefly, NewBook, ResNexus, and RMS for yourself.