PROFIT HOUND –

                        An Easy-to-Use Cost Accounting Program.

How much money are you making on your rebuilds, restringings, and action jobs? How much are you charging for these jobs? What really is your hourly take? Do you hire assistants, or farm out some of the tasks? Did you know that hiring assistants could actually put more money in your pocket?

If you are like many small job-shop operators, you probably have a vague sense of your profit and loss structure, but you really don’t know for sure, especially on a per-job basis. And general accounting programs, although necessary in order to keep track of all income and expenses, do not tell you whether or not you are actually making or losing money on a single job, such as a pinblock installation and restringing.

Enter PROFIT HOUND -- an easy-to-use Cost Accounting Program designed to sniff out the true bottom line. PH is built around a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet program, so you need to have Excel 97 (Version 8, released 1997) or newer on your computer in order to use this program.*

How It Works

PROFIT HOUND is built around an MS Excel Workbook comprised of seven pages.

1.      Setup – where you enter your desired hourly wage, and the fixed hourly wages of your hired assistants.

2.      Receipts and Costs – where you post all income received for the specific job, along with any and all costs that are specific to the single job you are working on.

3.      Work Log – where you post the tasks you and others performed each day, along with the number of hours for each worker.

4.      Summary Sheet One – this page is where PROFIT HOUND brings it all together. Total assistants (employees) cost, materials, parts, supplies, shipping costs, and farm-out costs are posted automatically here by the program. Most importantly, this is where you find out if you made a profit, and how much you, the owner, actually earned per hour – always and eye opener!

5.      Summary Sheet Two – is designed for those operators who prefer to charge according to a fixed hourly rate, and with a markup on materials or other items.

6.      Overhead Worksheet – optional to use, this worksheet will take certain of your fixed costs, such as rent or lease and utilities, and calculate them out into a “small piece of expense”, which is then figured into the number of hours worked on a specific job.

7.      Instruction and Tips – a simple Help and Suggestion Sheet to help you get the most out of the program.

 If you’re like me, once you let PROFIT HOUND help you sniff out the bottom line, you will wonder how you lived without it. Even if you find you are losing money on certain jobs, isn’t this something you need to know? Next time you can charge accordingly, or hire an assistant to help you operate in the black. And if you find you are making a profit on a per-job-basis, isn’t it nice to have a number to go with it?

PROFIT HOUND has helped me know where I stand on each job. I’m sure it can help you, too!

• Excel97 is the earliest version that any Excel user should be using. A future edition of PH will not require MS Excel, as it will be a stand-alone software program.
• OR: Download the free software from www.OpenOffice.Org, an Open Source Suite of excellent programs, including an Excel-Like spreadsheet! Profit Hound will open and run in the OO.Org spreadsheet program. You might consider sending OO a donation of any amount; still, much less than purchasing MS Excel.

See Screenshots of Profit Hound here

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