By JJ Keegan, Reality Mentor & Envisioning Strategist, JJKeegan+
I feel there are a lot of good software programs to aid the daily fee and municipal golf courses (listed in alphabetical order): Club Caddie, Club Prophet, ForeUp and Lightspeed.
On a recent client engagement, I had the opportunity to review in-depth G1 offered by GolfNow (SportsNext). I was disappointed, but not surprised, at what the client and I discovered. It reminded me what I saw previously.
About five years ago, a GolfNow salesperson showed me the revenue report for Colorado. They were realizing about $26,000 in annual sales which even then I thought was possibly expensive considering the other software alternatives.
In undertaking a detail financial analysis for the client of their “revenue leak” we noted the following:
Are my calculations correct? While the exact cost realized by GolfNow selling their tee times they obtained through barter is not known, is it reasonable to anticipate that those times would be sold for 60% of the prime-time rate?
If only $10 per time was realized in trade times sold generating $37,400 in bartered revenue, training the golfer to believe that is fair market value for the time sold has serious adverse long-range consequences for the golf course owner.
It should be noted that via the client’s website, GolfNow did sell 4,671 rounds (9.75% of total rounds) at an average price of $32.61.
Might a golf course owner justify that expense for the rounds generated through a third-party? Perhaps, if the report was so superlative and the software included dynamic pricing to ensure the facility was maximizing revenue.
In examining the rounds available, I noted only the following being active on the manager’s desktop terminal:
- Inventory Valuation
- Invoice Records
- Member Report
- Sales by Area
- Sales by Category
- Sales by Customer
- Sales by Department
- Sales by Hours
- Sales by Month
- Sales by Product
Basic reports. It was not readily apparent to the golf course manager or myself how that raw data could be filtered to create meaningful insights. It should be noted that we could export the data to excel, create a PivotTable and perhaps parse the data further.
I don’t believe that should be necessary. The necessary report should be contained within the software.
What then are the fundamental reports a golf course software solution should provide? While subject to debate, I believe the reports listed below provide a good start to provide the insights an astute golf course manager needs to maximize revenue.