Auto inventory management system
- Variance in units (negative is a shortfall)
- -86
- What the shortfall cost you to replace
- $1,075
- Count accuracy, percent of expected found
- 96.4
The arithmetic on these sheets is your own count: units, unit cost and reorder point in, variance and value out. Nothing is estimated and no industry average is applied to your numbers. Where a page states an outside figure it names the document it came from and links to it.
An auto inventory management system is a set of agreements first and a piece of software second. The agreements decide what a unit is, who may create one, what makes it ready to sell and what happens when it ages past the line you drew. Most of the frustration with these systems traces back to one of those four being undecided, at which point no product can help, because the product is faithfully recording a process nobody settled.
Open the Inventory spreadsheet template Free to use. No account, no card, no trial clock.
Write down what makes a unit sellable
Photographed, safety checked, priced, titled. Until that list exists, ready means whatever the person looking at the screen assumes, and your front line count is a guess. Once it exists, the system can hold it as a state and the number becomes real.
Key everything on the VIN
The federal VIN standard gives every vehicle a unique identifier, which makes it the only sane primary key. Stock numbers are for humans and should be a second field. Any system that allows two live records for the same VIN will eventually have two, and both will be advertised.
Hold one aging clock and let nobody reset it
Aging should run from the agreed entry event and never restart because a unit was reconditioned, moved or relisted. Businesses that allow a reset have an aging figure that describes their internal moves rather than the market's appetite for the car.
Separate the unit record from the parts record
They are different arithmetic. Units are individual and aging; parts are quantities with a reorder point and a variance. The count sheet on this site is the second kind, and it is the one most dealer-shaped systems treat as an afterthought.
Reconcile against the floor plan, not against yourself
If units are financed, the lender's list is the third opinion in the building and the only one with money attached. Reconciling your record against theirs quarterly finds sold-and-not-paid-off units and paid-off-and-still-listed ones, which is exactly the pair of errors an internal check cannot see.
Stock counts: what people ask before the first one
Do I need a system if I hold fewer than twenty units? You need the agreements. Whether they live in software or a spreadsheet at that size is a matter of taste, and a spreadsheet that everyone follows beats a product that two of three people ignore.
How does inventory show up at year end? Through valuation, which is where the IRS accounting-methods guidance applies. The practical point is that the valuation is only as good as the record it is drawn from, which is the argument for getting the entry rules right early.
What is the single most common data problem? Duplicate units created by two people entering the same car from different paperwork. Keying on the VIN prevents it outright, which is why it is worth insisting on before any other refinement.
Will the Auto inventory management system fit what you count?
Tell us what you are counting and how you count it today, and we will tell you whether Stocktaka fits before you pay for anything.