Motor Trade

How it works together

Two menus, two registers, one ledger. Reading the day in order is the quickest way to see where each half earns its keep.

1. Bring the cars in. Purchase order, proforma invoice, purchase invoice and receipt — and exactly one of those four is switched on to create the vehicle records, most often the purchase invoice, since that is where the purchase is booked. The habit that goes with it is one line per chassis.
2. Hold them one at a time. Each physical car is a record hung off an ordinary supply-chain item, and quantity and inventory cost are held against the pairing rather than the model. Import charges land as service lines on the purchase invoice, so the vehicle that waited a fortnight at the port carries what that cost.
3. Draw the lifecycle you actually run. Twenty status names ship as a catalogue and none of them is wired to a document until you write the row that wires it. An importer’s franchise and a used-car lot build very different chains out of the same list.
4. Sell a chassis, not a model. Quotation, order, allocation, invoice, final delivery, with the traffic letter alongside. Only the invoice is a financial event; what stops two salespeople selling the same car is the lifecycle refusing the second move rather than a flag on the record.
5. Publish the workshop’s day before selling it. Bays multiplied by hours become a published capacity split across appointments, carry-over, walk-ins and emergencies, and a booking is checked against the day it is asked for.
6. Divide the repair, then release the car. The four payer columns run from the estimate through to the closing, and the gate pass at the exit asks one question: has everybody who owes something been invoiced, and paid. Each check is a permission on the document term, so a workshop decides which of them to enforce.

The seam between the two halves is worth stating plainly rather than discovering in month three: they meet in the settings screen and nowhere else. That is not a defect to work around so much as the reason the workshop is worth buying on its own — an independent service centre repairs whatever comes through the gate, and nothing in the module ever asks who sold the car. The overview says it in the product’s own words under the sold car and the serviced car, and the payer arithmetic is set out in who pays for what.

Built for how the region actually works

Dealers here import rather than manufacture, so the number that decides whether a sale was good is landed cost per chassis — the invoice from the principal plus freight, customs and clearance, attached to the car those charges actually belonged to rather than smeared across a shipment. The customs block on the vehicle’s own screen keeps the list number, the release date, the vessel and the carrier where the paperwork can be found, which matters on the day an authority asks.

The rest reflects how the trade sells. Insurance and finance are closed across the same desk as the car, so the programmes behave as rate cards the salesperson quotes from. Franchised workshops carry manufacturer warranty and recall obligations, which is why a job order for a car caught by an open campaign is refused until the campaign is named on it. And a service department that is not franchised takes every make on the road, bills its own catalogue hours rather than the hours the technician spent, and prints a job sheet, a gate pass and an invoice that all read right-to-left.