How Autofid Tracks True Profit Per Car: The Complete Vehicle Stock Management Guide for Dealerships

Every vehicle on your forecourt represents capital at risk. The moment a car arrives in your stock, it begins costing you money — not just in the purchase price, but in daily running costs, preparation expenses, advertising, and the invisible drain of tied-up working capital. Most dealership software tracks what you paid and what you sold for. Autofid goes much further.

This guide is a complete walkthrough of Autofid's Vehicle Management module — from the first moment a vehicle enters your inventory to the final profit figure that locks in when the sale invoice is issued. By the end of this article, you will understand exactly how Autofid calculates true net profit per vehicle, why that number is more accurate than any spreadsheet can produce, and how to use that data to make better buying and pricing decisions.

Adding Vehicles to Stock: Three Acquisition Types

Autofid supports three distinct stock acquisition types, each representing a different commercial relationship with the vehicle source. Choosing the correct type is important because it affects how costs are attributed and how the sale is treated for VAT purposes.

Straight Purchase

You buy the vehicle outright from a supplier — an auction house, a fleet company, a manufacturer remarketer, or a private seller. The full purchase price is recorded as your cost base. If the supplier is VAT-registered and you receive a VAT invoice, the input tax is reclaimable. Autofid links the vehicle directly to the supplier record so the purchase appears in your supplier transaction history and your VAT on Purchases report.

Trade-In

A customer surrenders their existing vehicle as part-exchange towards a new purchase from you. The agreed trade-in value becomes the purchase price in Autofid. The original vehicle owner is recorded as a customer source rather than a supplier. Trade-ins are particularly important to track accurately because they often have hidden preparation costs — bodywork, mechanical issues, valeting — that must be recorded against the vehicle's cost to avoid overstating profit.

Consignment

You sell a vehicle on behalf of its owner and earn a commission or margin. The owner retains legal title until the sale is completed. In Autofid, consignment vehicles are tracked with an agreed floor price (the minimum the owner will accept) as the purchase price, and your revenue is the difference between the floor price and the actual sale price. This stock type is common for high-value classic vehicles and specialist imports where capital risk should sit with the owner rather than the dealer.

Vehicle Registration Lookup: Auto-Fill from the Plate

When you enter a registration number in Autofid, the system queries a vehicle data API and automatically populates the following fields — eliminating manual data entry and preventing transcription errors:

• Make and Model
• Year of manufacture
• Engine size and specification
• Fuel type (Petrol, Diesel, Hybrid, Electric, LPG)
• Body type (Saloon, Hatchback, Estate, SUV, Coupe, Convertible, Van)
• Transmission (Manual, Automatic, Semi-Automatic)
• Number of doors and seats
• Original colour
• ABI code (for insurance categorisation)
• County of registration (for Irish vehicles)

This API lookup data is stored permanently against the vehicle record as apiData, complete with a timestamp of the last update — giving you an audit trail of what information was retrieved and when.

The Vehicle Status Pipeline: Five Stages from Arrival to Sale

Every vehicle in Autofid moves through a defined status pipeline. Understanding what each status means — and what financial implications each transition triggers — is essential for managing your dealership effectively.

"The transition from Deposit Collected to Sold is the most financially significant moment in any vehicle's lifecycle in Autofid. The instant a vehicle is marked Sold, the overhead accrual clock stops, all costs are summed, and the final profit or loss figure is permanently recorded. This is the single most accurate profit-per-vehicle figure you will ever see."

Cost Layering: Building the True Vehicle on Purchase (VOP) Value

The purchase price is just the starting point. Autofid allows you to record multiple cost entries against each vehicle, each attached to a configured cost category. The cumulative total of these costs forms the vehicle's Vehicle on Purchase (VOP) value — the real cost of the vehicle to your business before any overhead is applied.

Typical cost categories for a used car dealership include:

Each cost entry in Autofid captures: the cost category, the supplier who performed the work or supplied the goods, the date of the expense, the net amount, the VAT rate, and the gross total. This level of granularity means every penny spent preparing a vehicle is tracked, attributed, and reflected in the final profit calculation.

Smart Overhead Tracking: The Innovation That Changes Profitability Reporting

Most dealership software ignores overhead allocation at the vehicle level — and this creates a dangerously misleading picture of profitability. If your dealership costs €9,000 per month to operate and you hold 30 vehicles in stock on average, each vehicle costs your business €10 per day simply to exist in your inventory. A vehicle that sits for 90 days has consumed €900 in overhead before you've even begun negotiating a sale price.

Autofid's Smart Overhead Tracking system solves this with automated daily accrual. Here is exactly how it works:

Step 1: Configure Your Overhead Categories

In Settings → Workshop Overhead, you define every fixed running cost of your business as an overhead category:

Example Overhead Configuration:

Category              | Monthly Amount | Allocation Period
--------------------- | -------------- | ----------------
Property Rent         | €3,200         | Monthly
Business Insurance    | €780           | Monthly
Electricity & Gas    | €540           | Monthly
Staff Salaries        | €6,400         | Monthly
Software Subscriptions| €190           | Monthly
Marketing (Fixed)     | €450           | Monthly
--------------------- | -------------- | ----------------
TOTAL MONTHLY OVERHEAD| €11,560        | Monthly

Step 2: Autofid Calculates the Daily Rate

Every night, Autofid's background job calculates the current daily overhead rate based on your configuration and the current number of vehicles in stock:

Daily Rate Per Vehicle =
  Total Monthly Overhead ÷ Average Vehicles In Stock ÷ Days in Month

Example:
  Total Monthly Overhead: €11,560
  Vehicles In Stock: 30
  Days in Month: 31

  Daily Rate = €11,560 ÷ 30 ÷ 31 = €12.43 per vehicle per day

Step 3: Overhead Accrues Daily Against Each Vehicle

Every vehicle in stock accumulates overhead continuously. After 60 days, a vehicle has accrued 60 × €12.43 = €745.80 in running costs against its record. This figure is shown on the vehicle detail page as Accrued Overhead — the current running total. It grows every day the vehicle remains in stock.

Step 4: Overhead Is Realised and Locked at the Point of Sale

The moment a vehicle is sold, Autofid performs a final overhead calculation and locks the figure permanently as Realised Overhead. This number never changes — it represents the exact cost of running your business that was consumed by this specific vehicle during its time in stock. It flows directly into the profit calculation:

True Net Profit per Vehicle =
  Sale Price
  − Purchase Price
  − Direct Costs (VOP preparation costs)
  − Realised Overhead (days in stock × daily rate)

Example:
  Sale Price:        €18,500
  Purchase Price:    −€13,000
  Direct Costs:      −€1,850
  Realised Overhead: −€745 (60 days)
  ────────────────────────────────
  TRUE NET PROFIT:   €2,905 (15.7% margin)

Without overhead allocation, this vehicle would appear to have made €3,650 gross profit. With it, the true figure is €2,905 — a meaningful difference that compounds across an entire dealership's annual sales volume.

Per-Vehicle Overhead Toggle

For situations where overhead should not apply to a specific vehicle — for example, a consignment vehicle where the owner bears the holding cost — you can toggle overhead tracking off for individual vehicles. Autofid also captures an overhead configuration snapshot at the time of the toggle, preserving a record of what the overhead settings were at that moment for auditing purposes.

Deposit Workflow: From Reservation to Completion

Autofid's vehicle sale workflow is designed to generate the correct legal documents at every stage:

Stage 1: Reservation

A customer expresses interest. The vehicle status moves to Reserved and a date_reserved timestamp is recorded. No money changes hands at this stage.

Stage 2: Deposit Collection

The customer pays a deposit. The vehicle status moves to Deposit Collected. Autofid generates a Deposit Note — a formal legal document containing:

• Vehicle details (registration, make, model, year)
• Buyer name and address
• Seller (your dealership) details and VAT number
• Deposit amount received
• Balance amount outstanding
• Agreed collection date
• Terms and conditions of the deposit

Stage 3: Sale Completion

The customer collects the vehicle and pays the balance. The vehicle status moves to Sold. Autofid generates a Sales Invoice — a complete VAT-compliant sales document containing:

• Full vehicle specification
• Complete pricing breakdown (deposit received, balance paid, total sale price)
• VAT treatment (standard rated or margin scheme)
• Buyer and seller details
• Invoice number and date
• Payment method

Both documents are generated as downloadable PDFs and stored permanently against the vehicle record. They are available for download at any time — making document retrieval for audit, dispute resolution, or customer queries instantaneous.

Custom Vehicle Fields: Capture What Matters to Your Business

Autofid understands that every dealership has unique information requirements. Through the Vehicle Custom Fields system, you can create additional data fields that appear on every vehicle record in your inventory.

Custom fields support five data types:

• Text — free-form text entry (e.g., "Previous owner notes", "Import history")
• Number — numeric values with validation (e.g., "Number of previous owners", "Service history count")
• Boolean — yes/no checkbox (e.g., "Full service history", "Two keys present")
• Select — dropdown with predefined options (e.g., "Condition rating: Excellent / Good / Fair / Poor")
• Date — date picker (e.g., "Last service date", "Warranty start date")

Custom fields can be marked as required — meaning no vehicle can be saved without that field being completed. They can also be reordered to match your internal workflow, ensuring the most important information appears first in the vehicle form.

The Profit Per Car Report: Your Most Powerful Management Tool

All of this data — purchase price, direct costs, realised overhead, sale price — comes together in the Profit Per Car Report. This report shows every vehicle sold in a selected period with complete transparency over every contributing cost factor.

The report is sortable by:

• Net profit / loss amount (highest to lowest)
• Profit margin percentage
• Sale price
• Date sold
• Days in stock

Sorting by Days in Stock descending immediately reveals your worst-performing stock decisions — vehicles that sat the longest before selling. Sorting by Profit Margin ascending shows which vehicles are dragging your average margin down. These insights are only possible because Autofid tracks cost at this level of granularity.

The full report exports to Excel with a single click — formatted for direct handoff to your accountant or finance team, with all calculations verified and documented.