Automotive Dealerships & Service Centres

The dealership

Vehicles are tracked individually, not as quantities of a model. The chain runs the length of the business:

Purchase order → purchase invoice → receipt → sales quotation → sales order → allocation → sales invoice → final delivery, with a traffic letter alongside.

The car records are created by the purchase invoice, so a vehicle exists in the system from the moment you commit to buying it. Landed cost spreads freight, customs and the rest across a shipment — order six cars at 74,000 each, add 15,000 of shipping and duty, and each one carries a true 76,500 into stock rather than a list price that flatters your margin.

Allocation reserves a specific chassis against a specific order, so two salespeople cannot promise the same car. Purchase returns and a full set of sales cancellation documents handle the deals that fall through.

A lifecycle you define

Nothing about a car’s behaviour is hard-coded. A car status configuration decides which document moves a vehicle to which status and which transitions are legal — so “reserved”, “in transit”, “in showroom”, “sold”, “delivered” are your words, matching how your business actually talks. This is configuration to be done at implementation, not a switch to flip afterwards.

Insurance and finance, sold with the car

A separately licensed extension covers what a dealer sells alongside the vehicle: insurance companies and programmes, insurance policies with their full set of policy documents and the insurance purchase invoice, plus finance companies, instalment programmes and instalment quotations. The paperwork that closes a retail car deal lives in the same system as the deal.

The workshop

The service side runs its own cycle, and it is built around how a real service department works rather than a generic work-order screen:

Service request → arrival and reception inspection → estimate → job order → parts issue → execution → closing → gate pass.

The service request reserves hours against a published capacity table, so bookings are made against real workshop availability. A reception inspection records the vehicle’s condition on arrival — which is what settles the conversation about a scratch that was or was not there before. The gate pass checks the invoices exist and are paid before the car leaves the site.

The four-way payer split

This is the part that generic ERP work orders do not have, and the reason dealership groups need software built for them.

A single repair is rarely paid for by a single party. On the job order, the cost is split across the customer, the insurer, the warranty provider and the workshop’s own pocket — 695 from the customer, 60 from insurance, 2,400 under warranty, 60 absorbed internally. Each payer is then invoiced separately.

Anyone who has tried to run that split through a normal sales invoice knows what it costs in manual reconciliation. Here it is a property of the job order.

Parts, sublet work and time

The storekeeper issues parts against the order and takes unused parts back. Components sent out to a specialist are tracked as external repairs. Technicians clock each task on and off, so measured time is recorded against the catalogue time the customer is billed for — the gap between them is the number that tells you whether your labour times are honest.

Closing pulls the finished work and consumed materials together, generates the stock issue, and projects the next visit date from the vehicle’s odometer history. Inspections and recall campaigns are supported for manufacturer work.

Reception, rental and delivery

Three smaller capabilities round out a dealer site:

• Service queues — a ticket kiosk in reception, a wall display that calls numbers, and a counter console for the advisor. The ticket closes when the job order it produced is committed.
• Rental assets — a booking desk for anything hired out by the hour or day, which dealers typically use for courtesy cars lent while a repair runs long.
• Courier delivery — a driver app that carries a route sheet of sales invoices, checks in and out of each stop and records what the customer actually received.

Reporting

The module concentrates on operations rather than analytics. For dashboards across sales, workshop throughput and payer mix, point the Business Intelligence module at the same live data — it reads the same database, so there is no export step.

Fit and licensing

The module is licensed in parts — the workshop, the dealership, insurance and instalments, rental, queues and courier delivery are separate codes, and the insurance extension needs the dealership licence with it. Which parts you need depends on whether you are a workshop, a showroom or both.

The full module documentation is public, including the setup order that avoids rework. Talk to us about your site and we will tell you which parts apply.