Car dealership inventory management
- 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.
A dealership is several businesses under one roof, and each of them owns stock the others cannot see. Sales holds units. Service holds parts and consumables. The workshop holds tools and equipment. Most dealership inventory problems are not counting problems at all: they are that the three keep separate lists, in separate systems, reconciled at separate times, and nobody owns the sentence that would join them.
Open the Inventory spreadsheet template Free to use. No account, no card, no trial clock.
Give each department its own list and one shared calendar
Units, parts, and equipment are genuinely different records and should not be forced into one. What should be shared is when they are counted, because a dealership that counts parts in March and equipment in November never has a single picture of what it holds.
Make the units list the one with an aging clock
It is the only one where time is the main cost. Keyed on the VIN assigned under the federal standard, with one entry event and no clock resets, the aging distribution becomes the number the sales meeting starts with.
Make the parts list the one with reorder points
Parts do not age, they run out, and the number that prevents a stopped job is the reorder point rather than the on-hand figure. The sheet on this page turns expected, counted, unit cost and a reorder share into the four figures a parts manager needs, from the department's own count.
Make the equipment list the one with custody
Lifts, diagnostic tools, tyre machines and the technicians' own issued kit. What you need here is who has it and what it cost, not how many are left. Reconciled whenever a technician leaves, this list stops being an annual archaeology exercise.
Stock counts: what people ask before the first one
Can one system hold all three? A full dealer management system will, and it is priced accordingly. For a small store, three well-kept lists with an agreed count calendar frequently outperform one platform that two departments use reluctantly.
Who should own the count calendar? One person, usually in the office rather than in a department, whose job is to make sure the counts happen rather than to do them. Departments that schedule their own counts do the ones they find useful and skip the rest.
How does this affect year-end valuation? All three lists feed it, and the parts and units figures are the material ones. The IRS accounting-methods guidance covers what the valuation has to be; what a dealership owes it is counts that were real.
What is the commonest cross-department loss? Parts consumed on internal work: reconditioning a unit for sale using parts that never got charged to anything. It shows as a parts variance and a flattered unit margin, and only a joined view ever finds it.
Do loaner and courtesy vehicles belong in the units list? In a separate status within it. They are owned, they age, and they are not for sale, so counting them as sellable stock overstates the lot and understates the fleet.
Should the workshop's consumables be counted at all? Yes, quarterly and briefly. It is a small number that is almost always worse than anyone expects, and it is the easiest of the three lists to start with.
Will the Car dealership inventory management 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.