Six cars, six costs
An item file will happily report that the yard holds six of a model. That number answers none of the questions a showroom actually asks. Which of the six has customs release? Which is promised to the customer who came in on Tuesday? Which one carries the freight from the shipment that sat at the port for a fortnight? Nobody buys a unit of a model — a buyer buys a chassis, and every question asked afterwards is a question about that one vehicle.
So each physical car carries its own master-file record, hung off the ordinary supply-chain item as a dimension of it. The item stays a normal item with a selling price and an item group; on-hand quantity and inventory cost are held against the pairing of item and car. That is what turns “what did this chassis cost us” from an average into an answer.
Where a car record is born
The buying chain runs purchase order, proforma purchase invoice, purchase invoice and receipt — and any one of those four can be the document that creates the vehicle records. It is a switch on the document term, and the implementation decision is to turn it on for exactly one of them. Most dealers choose the purchase invoice, since that is where the purchase is booked and the stock receipt is generated.
Two habits go with that choice. One line per chassis — a hand-typed line with a quantity of six produces one record standing for six cars — and a search of the file before anyone creates a record by hand, because nothing enforces that a chassis number is unique. The status configuration’s prime quantity must be one tick turns the first mistake into a refusal at the point of saving.
Import charges reach a car’s cost as service lines on the purchase invoice. The customs block on the vehicle’s own screen — list number, release date, vessel, carrier — is paperwork you record and report on; it is attached to no amount.
The assembler’s route
Not every dealer buys finished cars. A body-builder fitting cabs onto truck chassis, or a specialist converting panel vans, buys the chassis from one supplier and the engine from another. A sub item assembly document covers that case: one line per vehicle carrying its chassis and engine numbers, each checked against the serial and lot records of the components being consumed, so a vehicle cannot be built out of parts that were never received. It creates the car records and the supply-chain assembly that produces the finished units in one save. It needs the supply-chain assembly licence alongside the dealership one.
Selling one chassis
Quotation request, quotation, internal approval, sales order, allocation, invoice, final delivery — with the traffic letter request and the traffic letter beside them. Only the sales invoice is a financial event: revenue, tax, the receivable, cost of sales and the stock issue that takes the car off the floor. Everything ahead of it is paperwork, and paperwork can be undone.
Allocation is the moment somebody walks the yard with a clipboard and writes a buyer’s name against one chassis, stamping customer, branch, department, salesperson and warehouse onto the vehicle. What stops a second salesperson selling the same car is not that stamp but the lifecycle around it: with no legal move from allocated back to allocated, the second document refuses to commit, and the car picker on each document can be restricted to the statuses that are still saleable.
Cancellation works in a way worth knowing before you plan around it. Each cancellable document has its own cancellation type, which points at the original through the from document field, marks it, and moves the vehicle’s status. It reverses nothing else — money and stock come back only through the car sales return.
A lifecycle you draw per item
Every model’s item carries a car status configuration, and it holds two tables: which document pushes a car to which status, and which status-to-status moves are legal at all. Twenty status names ship as a catalogue — in transit, customs, free stock, booked, allocated, invoiced, delivered, five spare slots — and none of them is wired to a document until you write the row that wires it. An importer’s dealership and a used-car lot draw very different chains from the same list.
The engine replays rather than appends: every document that touches a car writes a dated status entry, and on each commit the whole history is re-sorted by value date and re-checked link by link. Correcting a car’s past therefore works backwards from the newest document, not forwards. This is configuration to be finished at implementation, on a test car walked through the whole chain.
Insurance and finance, sold with the car
Insurance programmes, policies and their documents, finance companies, instalment programmes and instalment quotations sit behind their own licence code — and that code is not self-contained: the insurance company master file belongs to the dealership licence, so the two are bought together. Read the programmes as rate cards for the person filling the form: the price bands and negotiated percentages are what the salesperson quotes, and the premium that reaches the ledger is the figure typed on the policy.
The workshop is a separate licence and a separate register, covered on the car workshop page; the two halves together are the dealer group’s stack. The whole selling chain is documented step by step in the car sales cycle.
