The second part of the benchmarking service provides a comparison of your business financial data, with that of the aggregate data for the book shops sector from the FMRC Benchmarking database. To enable a useful comparison against the benchmark data, booksellers are requested to enter approximately 40 cells of business and financial data provide into a spreadsheet. The data is commonly available from the balance sheet and the profit and loss statement. The data includes: number of business owners; shop trading hours and space; number of employees; income; overheads; assets and liabilities.
The financial data will be handled by a third party, Australian Retail Services, and remains confidential between the parties. A confidentiality agreement that individual data will not be disclosed will be part of the service. The ABA will only be provided with summary reports of aggregate data, that does not identify any individual members.
The benefit of this report to members is that it provides a snapshot of their business and financial data, against the same categories of the benchmark data. To assist relevancy and usefulness, the comparisons will be made between bookshops of a similar size and turnover. For example, the report will specify the net profit per working owner of your bookshop, compared to the net profit per working owner of the benchmark data. Another example is the report could identify that your bookshop is generating a below average gross profit margin and calculates the profit gap. This gap represents additional profit that could be realised by your business provided some changes were made.
A fee will be applicable for this service to be launched in 2008.
If you would like to be contacted please send your details to mail@aba.org.au.
