OIQ Blog
Practical guides on restaurant P&L, franchise financial reporting, and heavy equipment fleet analytics.
Most fleet owners know their fuel cost. Almost none know their true all-in cost per mile by truck. Here's the 6-layer calculation that separates profitable fleets from ones bleeding money.
Most small business owners check their bank balance and call it financial management. Here are the seven numbers that actually tell you whether your business is healthy — and how to calculate each one from data you already have.
Most small business owners confuse profitability with cash flow. They're related but different — and understanding the gap is the difference between a business that grows and one that constantly feels like it's running on empty.
Service absorption rate measures how much of your dealership's total fixed overhead is covered by service and parts gross profit. A rate above 100% means you profit on every vehicle you sell — before counting the margin. Here's how to calculate it and what to do if yours is low.
For most automotive and equipment dealers, the service department generates 50-70% of gross profit despite accounting for a fraction of revenue. Here's how to read service department financials like a dealer CFO.
QuickBooks is the default accounting tool for most independent restaurants — but it was built for general business, not hospitality. Here's an honest look at where it excels, where it falls short, and what to do about the gaps.
Utilization rate tells you what percentage of available hours your machines are actually working. Here's what good looks like by equipment type, why most fleets are measuring it wrong, and how to use it to make smarter deployment decisions.
A full-time FP&A hire costs $80–120K/year. AI tools cost a fraction of that. But what do you actually get — and what do you give up? An honest breakdown for small business owners.
Opening a second location changes everything about how you manage financial performance. Here are the five metrics that separate thriving multi-unit operators from ones who wish they'd stayed single-location.
Ghost equipment — machines assigned to customers who no longer own them — skews every fleet report you run. Here's what causes it, how to find it, and why it's harder to fix than it looks.
Your break-even point tells you exactly how much revenue you need to cover every fixed and variable cost. Here's how to calculate it — and how to use it to make smarter decisions about staffing, hours, and pricing.
Most fleet managers track idle time as a percentage. Finance teams care about dollars. Here's how to calculate the actual cost — and why the number usually surprises people.
Food cost running high but you're not sure why? Here's how to calculate your actual food cost percentage, what the benchmarks are by concept type, and the six places leakage hides.
Multi-location franchise operators spend hours each month aggregating P&Ls that should take minutes. Here's why the problem is harder than it looks — and how modern software solves it.
Labor is the most controllable — and most misunderstood — cost in a restaurant. Here are the benchmarks by service type, and how to know if you have a real problem.
Most restaurant operators look at revenue. CFOs look at four numbers. Here's how to read your P&L the way a financial analyst would — and what to fix first.