Shop Profitability Guide

Is your shop actually on track to hit your profit goals this year — or will you find out in February that it wasn't?

Most shop owners don't have a way to see where they're headed until it's too late to do anything about it. The Shop Profitability Guide in My Shop Assist changes that. In this video, we walk through the full guide step by step — from setting your end-of-year profit target, to calculating the hourly rate you need to charge, to a weekly roadmap that tells you exactly where you need to be every single week of the year.

What we cover:
- Setting your bottom line profit goal (and why your salary is an expense, not profit)
- Entering your annual expenses and payroll — including what most shops forget
- How MSA calculates the gross profit you actually need to generate to hit your goal
- The parts margin and labor ratio inputs that affect your numbers more than you think
- The hourly rate calculator — map your team's hours, efficiency, and productivity to find the rate you need to charge (with a slider to model different scenarios)
- Your weekly roadmap — so a bad stretch shows up in March, not February
- The operational P&L view and what it's actually useful for
- The Progress Tracker — live notifications for data gaps that quietly kill your profitability

This guide works best when your techs are tracking time, your parts have wholesale prices set, and your employee wages are configured in MSA. If that foundation is in place, this tool gives you a clear, data-driven target to work toward every week.