Industry · Car dealership
Stock and sales system for a Kenyan car yard
A car yard is the opposite of a supermarket. It might sell eight units in a month, each worth what a duka turns over in a year, and every unit is unique — its own chassis number, its own history, its own cost, and quite often its own owner, because a good share of the yard is consignment stock belonging to somebody else.
Systems built around quantities are the wrong shape entirely. "Four Toyota Fielders" is not a useful stock figure when the four differ by year, mileage, condition and margin, and when two of them are not yours to sell. What the business needs is a record per vehicle and a settlement position per owner.
What solves it
One vehicle, one serialised unit
Each car is an individual unit with its chassis or registration number, its own cost and its own margin — never one of a quantity.
Consignment stock and settlement
Hold vehicles you do not own without inflating your assets, and settle the owner for the specific unit when it sells.
Quotations that convert to orders
Quote a buyer, hold the figure, and convert it when they commit — at the price quoted, with the deposit against it.
Deposits and staged payments
A vehicle sale is rarely one payment. Part payments accumulate against the unit until the balance clears.
Write-offs and reconditioning costs
Costs added to a specific vehicle land on that vehicle's margin, so the car that needed a gearbox is not averaged in with the one that did not.
A worked example: whose car is it, and what did it make?
Your yard has eleven cars. Six you bought, five are on consignment for three different owners. A Fielder sells for KES 1,340,000 — it was consigned by an owner expecting KES 1,220,000, and you spent KES 46,000 on reconditioning and KES 8,000 on transport before it sold.
Treated as a quantity, this sale looks like KES 1,340,000 of revenue and a very healthy month, which is wrong in two directions. Most of that money is not yours — KES 1,220,000 belongs to the consignor — and the KES 54,000 you spent on the vehicle has to come off what remains. The real margin is KES 66,000, and if the reconditioning had run to KES 120,000, as it sometimes does, the deal lost money while appearing to be your best sale of the quarter.
Held as a serialised unit, the arithmetic is automatic. The consignment position means the vehicle never inflated your stock value, the reconditioning and transport costs attach to that specific chassis number, and the settlement to the owner is for that unit. What you see at month end is KES 66,000 of margin on that car, next to the margins on the other seven, which is the only view that tells you which kind of vehicle is worth taking on consignment at all.
- →Sold KES 1,340,000; consignor's KES 1,220,000 was never yours
- →KES 46,000 reconditioning + KES 8,000 transport on that chassis
- →Real margin KES 66,000, not KES 1,340,000 of revenue
- →Consignment stock does not inflate the yard's asset value
The features this trade leans on
Each one goes deeper than this page does — start with the first.
Reports and real accounting
Double-entry books — trial balance, P&L, balance sheet — not a CSV export to somebody else's software.
Customers and loyalty
Credit accounts that do not go missing, loyalty that returns, and a debtor list you can actually chase.
Buying, suppliers and approvals
Purchase orders, goods-received notes, supplier bills and the cost figure every margin depends on.
Selling at the counter
Split payments, held orders, manager-gated discounts and a drawer count that reconciles.
Questions from this trade
Can each vehicle be tracked individually?
Yes. A vehicle is a serialised unit carrying its own chassis or registration number, cost, reconditioning spend and margin. It is never one of a quantity, which is what makes per-unit profitability visible.
How does consignment stock work?
Vehicles held on consignment sit in the yard without being your inventory, so they do not overstate what the business owns. When one sells you settle the owner for that specific unit; what does not sell is returned, with the ownership position clear throughout.
Can I add reconditioning costs to a specific car?
Yes, and this is where the margin actually goes. Costs attach to the individual vehicle rather than being averaged across the yard, so a car that needed a gearbox shows its true margin instead of dragging down the ones that were clean.
Can I take a deposit and staged payments?
Yes. Part payments accumulate against the unit until the balance clears, and the vehicle does not release until the money adds up. A car sale is rarely a single tender.
Is this a full dealer management system?
No, and it is worth being straight about that. sell.ke covers the stock, sales, quotations, consignment settlement and the ledger. Workshop job cards, parts catalogues and manufacturer warranty systems are a different category of software — ask before assuming, rather than after.
Will it show me my profit?
Yes, and from a real ledger rather than a sales total. Every sale posts to a double-entry chart of accounts, so you get a trial balance, profit and loss, balance sheet and cash flow — not a CSV to hand your accountant. Margin is visible per product, per branch and per channel, because cost is tracked on the way in through purchase orders and goods-received notes.
Can I stop staff from giving discounts or deleting sales?
Yes. Discounts, voids and refunds sit behind a manager PIN, and every one of them records who authorised it and when. Staff accounts carry role permissions, so a cashier can sell without seeing cost prices, editing products or opening reports. A void that reverses stock is a movement in the audit trail, not a gap in it.
What does it cost?
Plans run from KES 1,499/month for a single-branch till to KES 14,999/month for unlimited scale, with the online shop, M-Pesa checkout and KRA eTIMS receipts included from KES 2,999/month. Every plan starts with a 14-day trial and no card. There is no hardware to buy — sell.ke runs on a phone, tablet or laptop you already own.
Similar trades
Try it in your car dealership
Fourteen days, no card, no hardware to buy. Import your product list or let Amina build it from a photo of your price list.