By David Markowitz
Facilities managers are tasked with all kinds of responsibilities, from ensuring the look and feel of a company’s locations remains in top notch order to literally keeping the lights on. To say one is pulled in all directions is an understatement.
Everyone across the company has requests that need to be met, usually on an urgent basis. But there’s often one particular audience that can be a real challenge to satisfy: the Chief Financial Officer.
With hundreds of locations, pieces of equipment and contractors resulting in thousands of invoices, staying on top of everything is tough in the best cases. Responding to your CFO and the finance department is exceedingly difficult. And proactively keeping the facilities department a step ahead of financial issues can be near impossible — without the ability to monitor the proper metrics.
• But what are the metrics that are important for a facilities management group to track and report on to the finance group?
• What are the numbers that modern facilities managers share with their CFO?
• What financial benchmarks and data points should you regularly use to optimize performance and make smarter decisions?
Below are a number of the key metrics that leading facility managers regularly monitor and importantly, how they act on them. In all these cases, you should be able to track these financial metrics for facilities management operations at individual location levels, regional levels and corporate-wide. Ideally, you’re at least able to easily track some of them.
Regardless, understanding the numbers across your repair and maintenance operations is an important first step to gaining complete visibility for your facilities program, and being able to provide actionable data for management.
The eight metrics are:
1. Top Trades by Spend Variance
2. Top Providers by Spend Variance
3. Top Locations by Spend Variance
4. Month-to-Month Invoice Spend
5. Not to Exceed (NTE) Limits and Variances
6. Categories by Spend Variance
7. Actual Costs vs. Budget
8. Costs Per Square Foot
David Markowitz is senior director, product marketing, for ServiceChannel. For more on this topic, download ServiceChannel's eBook: “8 Financial Reports Every Facilities Manager Needs (And Every CFO Loves).”
