Car Stock and Inventory Management Software for UK Garages and Traders

That sounds simple enough to keep on a spreadsheet, and for the first three or four cars it is. The trouble starts when prep costs arrive in dribs and drabs weeks after the purchase — a set of tyres, an MOT and a service, a windscreen, a valet — and none of it gets written down against the right car. By the time a buyer is haggling on the drive, nobody can say with confidence what that vehicle actually owes.

Most garages selling a few cars a month are running the forecourt on memory. It works, mostly, and it quietly costs money in three specific ways: units sold too cheaply because the prep spend was underestimated, cash tied up in cars nobody realised had been sitting for four months, and buyers waiting on paperwork because the sale lives in a different place to the workshop.

My Garage CRM's car stock module deals with all three, and it sits alongside the diary, the jobs, the parts and the customer records rather than in a separate app you have to remember to open.

Because cost price and prep cost live on the vehicle record, the margin is worked out per unit and stays current as costs go on. You are never reconstructing it from memory at the point of sale.

The stock list sorts by highest margin, so you can see which cars are worth pushing and which are barely paying for the space they occupy. That is a different question from which car is the most expensive, and it is the one that matters.

Four numbers across the whole forecourt

Most small traders could not tell you these off the top of their head. The stock screen shows all four at once:

The minimum price field

One field on the pricing screen does more work than the rest: the minimum price, the lowest figure you will take. It sounds trivial. It is the difference between negotiating and guessing.

Deciding your walk-away number in the quiet of the office, with the cost and the prep spend in front of you, is a completely different exercise from deciding it on the forecourt with a buyer watching your face. Most generic inventory tools have no field for it, because most were not built by anyone who has sold a car.

Every unit records days in stock from the moment it goes on, and the list sorts oldest first. It is a plain number and it is the most useful one on the screen.

A car sitting for ninety days is not simply a car that has not sold yet. It is money you cannot use to buy the next one. It is a unit that will probably need something else doing before it goes — another MOT, a battery, a fresh valet. And it is usually a car that was priced slightly wrong on day one and never revisited.

Traders who watch this number reprice early and turn stock faster. Traders who do not tend to find out how long something has been there at the point they finally shift it at a loss. Sorting by age takes two seconds and tells you what needs dealing with this week.

Available, reserved, sold

Vehicle status is set on the record and filters the list. A car held on a deposit shows as reserved rather than sold, so it is visibly different from one that has gone and been paid for — and if the deal falls through, the status goes back without the vehicle being stuck in the wrong state.

Not every vehicle needs a portal listing. Plenty sell to someone who already services their car with you, to a friend of a customer, or to whoever replies first in a local Facebook group.

Generate a public share link for any vehicle and it produces a proper page with photos, spec, advert description and a contact number. Share it to WhatsApp or Facebook with one tap, or copy the link and send it however you like.

You can set a separate advert contact number from your main line, so sales enquiries do not tie up the phone the workshop needs. When those enquiries come in, the car sales CRM tracks each lead from first contact to handover. And when the car is gone, stop sharing — the link dies, so you are not still fielding calls three weeks later about something you sold.

Download it as a PDF for your records or email it straight to the buyer from the system. The invoice number and date sit on the record, so the paperwork exists in one place rather than in a folder on somebody's desktop.

If you only sell cars, a dedicated dealer system makes sense. If you run a workshop that also sells cars — which describes most independents with a few units out front — the two halves feed each other constantly, and keeping them in separate systems is exactly where the admin goes.

A customer brings their car in for an MOT. It fails on something expensive. They ask what you have got for sale.

In a joined-up system that is one conversation. The customer is already in your CRM with their full service history. The car they are trading in has a record you can see, because you have been maintaining it. The car they are buying is in your stock list with its asking price and your minimum. And the prep work on the trade-in goes through the workshop as a normal job, so the labour and parts land against that unit.

That last point is the one most people miss. Prep done in your own workshop is still a real cost. If it is not recorded against the vehicle, the margin on that unit is fiction.

The case for keeping car stock in your garage system is not a longer feature list. It is fewer places for the same car to exist.

VAT on a used vehicle is more complicated than VAT on a service, and it depends on how you bought the car. Many second-hand vehicle sales are handled under the VAT margin scheme, where VAT is accounted for on the margin rather than the full selling price — but whether that applies to a given vehicle depends on how you acquired it and how you are registered.

That is a decision for you and your accountant, and the current rules are on GOV.UK. My Garage CRM records the VAT you tell it to record on the sale invoice, with the rate and amount shown separately. It does not decide your VAT treatment for you, and no software should claim to.

What it does give you is the record: what you paid, what you spent, what you sold it for, when, and to whom, with the invoice attached. Whichever scheme you are on, that is the evidence your accountant will ask for — and having it per vehicle rather than scattered across a bank statement and a notebook is what makes the year-end conversation a short one.

The Car Sales module is part of the Enterprise plan, alongside recovery and breakdown tracking, SMS marketing campaigns, the financial dashboard, API access and priority support.

Every account starts with 28 days of full access to everything, with no card required — so you can put real vehicles through the stock flow, raise a real sale invoice and see whether it fits how you work before deciding anything. Migration from whatever you use now is free, and if there is a field you need that we do not have, we will build it.