Vehicle inventory management: what a vehicle inventory management system has to hold
- 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.
Vehicle inventory management covers more businesses than car sales. A plant hire company, a rental operator, a municipal fleet and a haulier all hold vehicles as inventory, and none of them is selling them this month. What they share with a dealer is that each unit is individual, identified and expensive to have sitting idle; what they need from a system is therefore closer to an asset register with a utilisation clock than to stock control.
Open the Inventory spreadsheet template Free to use. No account, no card, no trial clock.
Decide whether your vehicles are stock or assets
A dealer's units are stock: bought to sell, aged in days, valued at cost. A fleet's vehicles are assets: bought to use, measured in utilisation and cost per mile, depreciated. The same product rarely serves both well, and choosing the wrong shape is the reason many fleet operators find dealer software unusable.
Key on the identifier, whichever kind you are
The vehicle identification number assigned under the federal standard is unique and permanent, and everything else about the unit should hang from it: service history, odometer readings, disclosure documents, photographs, and the parts fitted to it.
Record the odometer as a series, not as a field
One reading is a data point; a series is a utilisation curve, a service forecast and a fraud check all at once. It is also what the federal odometer disclosure rule ultimately rests on at the point of transfer, which is a good reason to have kept the history honestly.
Count the parts and consumables the vehicles consume
Whatever the fleet does, it holds filters, oils, tyres and spares somewhere, and that shelf is ordinary stock control. The sheet on this page does it: expected against counted, the gap at your own cost, a reorder point and the hours the count takes.
Stock counts: what people ask before the first one
Is a fleet system the same as a dealer system? No, and the mismatch is the most common wasted purchase in this area. Dealer systems are organised around selling a unit; fleet systems are organised around keeping it running. The tell is whether the product's main screen shows days in stock or next service due.
What is the minimum record per vehicle? Identifier, acquisition date, cost, current holder or location, and odometer history. With those five you can compute utilisation, cost and a replacement forecast, which is most of what a fleet decision needs.
How do we handle vehicles off the road? As a status with a start date, not as a deletion. Days off the road are the most valuable number a fleet has, and a vehicle that simply disappears from the list while it is in the workshop makes that number impossible to compute.
Where does the parts shelf fit? As a separate list with its own reorder points, ideally linked to the vehicle record so a part fitted is recorded against both. Linked is better; separate but counted is a great deal better than neither.
Will the Vehicle 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.