How Power Barn improved Inventory, Accounting, Reporting and Price Book Automation for their 2 locations

Ryusei Matzen, Partner – Jackson, MI

Running a successful dealership requires a lot of coordination and organization, especially when managing multiple locations. 7 years ago The Power Barn found a way to keep track of their inventory, sales and service requests with our all in one system. Since then they’ve opened another location and continue to improve their efficiency.

Check out their story in the video below!

What areas of your dealership have you adopted Ideal?

Ryusei: For inventory, accounting, the really nice thing is having the price books updated. So, working directly with the manufacturer to be able to update the prices and not manually do a lot of things. Anything that we can use Ideal for, we’re trying to because they offer a lot of services or things that we can utilize to help make our business more efficient.

What was your experience using Ideal for reporting?

Ryusei: For reporting in our dealership, particularly in the service department, taking a look at billable hours that our technicians are putting out versus what they work, trying to test efficiencies as we’re working with the techs, what processes help make them more efficient and we can gauge that over time.

Then, looking at the books at the end of the month and making sure that everything lines up. You can pull your balance sheet and you can pull your income statement right from that same software.

In what ways has the Parts Locator affected your dealership?

Ryusei: Locator program helped us find some parts, especially parts that aren’t supported anymore or for products that aren’t supported anymore. A dealer maybe 50 miles away has a part that a certain manufacturer doesn’t produce anymore and we can’t get it. To get the OEM part – because we’d like to install only OEM parts – we have to be able to find it and Parts Locator has made that possible.

Can you share your experience with TargetCRM?

Ryusei: TargetCRM’s really good for texting and it’s another integration with Gravity. We’ve been able to start using Text to Pay, which is really nice and takes some time away from the counter people where they would be involved with talking to customers. We can still communicate with the customer and allow the people at the shop to be more productive and get more things done.

What would you say to other dealerships that are considering Ideal?

Ryusei: Talking to another dealership about Ideal, I would definitely recommend it. There’s a lot of areas that Ideal can cover from having TargetCRM to being able to keep up with your books and being able to check your inventory and receive parts and literally do almost everything within your dealership, within this one software, I think sells itself.

Even if you still like QuickBooks, with the QuickBooks integration, you don’t have to double enter or do any of that. It automatically uploads.

It’s definitely an all-around great product. It offers a lot of different solutions for our needs.