Five numbers to check every morning at a tire shop

Paid yesterday, open tickets, low stock, asked-for-not-in-stock and tires added: five numbers worth five minutes before the phone starts ringing.

Five numbers tell you whether yesterday was a good day or a bad one. You don't need software to track them, though it helps. A notebook works. A spreadsheet works. What matters is looking at the same five things every morning, before the phone starts ringing and the day takes over.

Most shop owners already know these numbers in a fuzzy sense. They can feel when business is slow or when the racks are getting thin. The point of a morning routine isn't to replace that instinct. It's to catch the problems your gut misses, because a slow week can hide a fast-growing shrink problem, and a busy week can hide the fact that three of your best-selling sizes ran out on Tuesday.

Paid yesterday

This is the number everything else gets measured against: total cash in, across every payment method, for tires sold yesterday. Not quoted. Not "should have closed." Paid. If your total from the register doesn't match your total from receipts, find out why before you start today's tickets, not at the end of the month when the gap has grown into something bigger.

Break it down by payment method while you're at it. Cash, card, and the app payments (Zelle, Cash App, Venmo) each behave differently. Cash is easiest to lose track of, so if that number looks off compared to a normal day, it's worth a second look before you move on.

Open tickets

Count every job that's been started but not finished and paid. A tire sitting on rack B2 waiting for pickup. A mount half-done because a customer stepped out. A quote from three days ago nobody's called back about. Open tickets pile up quietly, and a shop with fifteen of them lying around is a shop that's losing track of its own floor.

Old tickets are the ones that matter most. Anything sitting open for more than two or three days needs a phone call, not another day of waiting. Either the customer comes back for it or the tire goes back into stock. Leaving it in limbo helps nobody, and it quietly ties up a rack space you could be using.

Low-stock sizes and requests you couldn't fill

Two numbers, one look. First: which sizes are down to your last one or two, the ones that'll turn into a lost sale by Thursday if nobody reorders. Second: "asked for, not in stock," meaning every size a customer wanted that you didn't have. That second list is worth more than most shops realize. It's a shopping list somebody else wrote for you, for free.

Check it before you call a wholesaler or head out to look at a batch lot. If 225/65R17 shows up three mornings running on the "asked for" list, that's not a coincidence. That's demand telling you exactly what to buy next, in the size customers actually drive.

Tires added

How many tires went into inventory yesterday, new and used combined. This one catches problems fast. A number that's near zero for three days running usually means a sourcing trip got skipped, or someone forgot to log a batch that's sitting in the back untouched.

It also catches the opposite problem: a big number that never shows up as sales later. If forty tires got added last month and only twelve sold, something's off, either the pricing, the sizes bought, or the condition grading on that batch. The tires-added number by itself doesn't answer the question. It just tells you where to start looking.

Getting these numbers without drowning in spreadsheets

A morning count doesn't need to be complicated. Here's a routine that works whether you're on paper or an app:

1. Pull yesterday's total paid from the register or the app's daily summary.
2. Count open tickets on the rack or in the queue, out loud if that helps.
3. Scan the low-stock list, or walk the racks if you don't have one yet.
4. Check what customers asked for and left without.
5. Add up tires logged in yesterday, whether that's a spreadsheet row or a scan.

Five steps. Five minutes, once it's a habit. DuroBay's Today screen puts all five in front of you when you open the app, no digging through paper required, though the routine works just the same with a clipboard behind the counter.

None of this replaces walking the floor. It just tells you where to walk first, and it flags the used tire nearing its age limit before a customer finds it for you.

Start small if five numbers feels like a lot at once. Pick paid yesterday and low stock for the first week. Add the rest once checking those two is automatic. The goal is a habit that survives a busy Monday, not a perfect spreadsheet nobody has time to open.