Automotive inventory software
- 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.
Most searches for automotive inventory software come from the parts side of the building rather than the lot: an independent workshop, a specialist shop, a mobile mechanic with a van and a lockup. The problem is not usually finding a product, it is that the products found are built for a dealership with a parts manager, and the business doing the searching has a fitter who wants a part now. What follows is the shape that actually works at that size.
Open the Inventory spreadsheet template Free to use. No account, no card, no trial clock.
Count the fast lines often and the tail rarely
In most workshops a small minority of part numbers account for most of the pulls. Those are the lines worth counting weekly, because they are where the shortfall is and where a stockout stops a job. The long tail of slow lines is worth counting once or twice a year, and counting it more often is how a business gives up on counting.
Treat every van as its own location
Van stock behaves nothing like the lockup: different usage, different person, different reorder point, and a much higher leak rate because nobody writes down what came off the shelf on a driveway. Count each van separately. A blended figure across the business hides the fact that almost all of the variance is in one vehicle.
Put the cost you pay in the sheet, not the price you charge
A 60 unit shortfall on a line that costs you $9.40 is $564 to replace, and that is the figure that decides whether this matters. The same shortfall at the marked-up price reads far worse and tells you nothing you can act on, because you never had that money.
Record the pull at the point of the pull, or accept the variance
Every workshop leaks through the door. The fix is not a stricter policy, it is making the record cheaper than the walk back: a phone entry, a docket book on the shelf, a whiteboard by the door. Whichever you choose, the count is how you find out whether it worked.
Keep chemicals on their own list
Oils, brake cleaner, solvents and aerosols carry hazard communication duties under the federal standard, and the practical connection to inventory is that the list of what you hold should match the list of what you have safety data sheets for. A count is the natural moment to notice that it does not.
Stock counts: what people ask before the first one
Do I need automotive-specific software, or will general stock control do? General stock control does the arithmetic perfectly. What automotive-specific products add is a parts catalogue with interchange and fitment data, which is genuinely valuable if you look parts up all day and irrelevant if you already know what you stock.
How do I handle a part that fits several vehicles? As one line with a combined usage rate. The temptation is to hold a separate figure per application so every job looks covered, and the result is a business carrying several times the stock it needs.
What about cores and exchange units? Give them their own status rather than counting them as stock. A core waiting to go back is neither sellable nor missing, and folding it into the on-hand figure corrupts both the variance and the value.
Is it worth barcoding a small workshop? Rarely, below a few hundred lines. The scanner is a project, and the constraint in a small shop is almost never typing speed. Revisit it when the count itself has become routine.
What should the first count aim at? A baseline, not a result. The first count of a shelf nobody has ever counted will produce an uncomfortable number that mostly measures years of accumulated record drift. The second count, six weeks later, is the one that tells you something about today.
Will the Automotive inventory software 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.