Workshop cars, demos and courtesy cars: why your stock check keeps finding "missing" vehicles

Run a stocktake at a typical franchised site and you will finish with a list of twenty or thirty exceptions. Look closely and most of them are not problems. They are the demonstrator that went out at nine, the courtesy car with Mrs Patel until Thursday, four cars at the bodyshop, two at auction, and a dozen customers’ cars in the workshop that were photographed because they have plates and were on the land.

None of those are missing or unexpected. They are just unknown to the stock list, because the stock list is a sales document and these are service and logistics facts.

Two registers, kept daily

The fix is two short registers alongside the stock list. An off-site register: every one of our vehicles that is legitimately away, with what kind of movement it is (demo, courtesy, auction, trade, bodyshop), who has it, and when it is due back. And a workshop register: every customer’s car on site for work, from the workshop diary, with the job number.

Both take a minute to maintain if they are part of the handover: a demo does not leave without being recorded, a courtesy car is booked out on the loan agreement. Most service departments already keep the second one; it is called the diary.

What changes at the count

With the registers in place, the stocktake can do the sorting. A car on the off-site register is treated as accounted for while its record is open, so it is not "missing" and its value is not "at risk". A plate that matches the workshop register comes back as "customer car", not "not on the list", and carries no value. What is left in the exceptions is the real list: cars that should be here and are not, cars that are here and nobody knows why, and cars whose status is wrong.

The overdue courtesy car is a bonus: a register with a due-back date tells you which loans have quietly become long-term.

In Forecourt

Workshop and Off site are the two registers in the app. Upload the workshop diary or add cars by hand, record movements with a due-back date, and the stocktake uses both automatically. The review screen shows customer cars on their own tab and lets you record a car as off site from an exception in one tap.