Used inventory is the fastest-moving money in the store and the slowest to report on. We build the reporting that shows aging by source, cost-to-market against the guide, and reconditioning time broken into stages — so the question stops being which units are old and becomes where the days went.
Aging, cost, and recon tracked at the stock-number level, not by bucket average
Cycle time split into the steps where the days are actually lost
Trade, auction, street purchase, and lease return measured separately
Cost-to-market and price-to-market against live market data
Every used vehicle manager knows which units are over sixty days. Very few can say why those particular units are over sixty days — whether they were bought wrong, priced wrong, held in recon for nine days waiting on a part, or photographed two weeks after they hit the lot.
The distinction matters because the fixes are different and they sit with different people. An acquisition problem is a buying discipline conversation. A recon problem is a fixed-operations scheduling conversation. A merchandising problem is a photographer and a description. Aging reports collapse all three into one number, which is why the same conversation happens every month and nothing structural changes.
We build the reporting that separates them, at the unit level, with a clock that starts when the vehicle was acquired rather than when someone got around to stocking it in.
Age measured from acquisition, not from stock-in. The gap between the two is often a week of invisible depreciation, and it is the first number most stores have never seen.
Turn, gross, and recon spend by source — trade, auction, street purchase, lease return — and by the buyer who sourced it. Some channels look cheap until reconditioning is charged against them.
Total investment against market value at each point in the life of the unit, so a pricing decision is made against where the vehicle actually sits rather than against what was paid for it.
Split into stages: arrival to inspection, inspection to approval, approval to work start, work to parts wait, parts to completion, completion to photographs. The constraint is almost never the technician.
Estimate against actual per unit, by shop and by service line, with the recurring overruns identified so the estimating gets better rather than the variance getting absorbed.
Days from lot-ready to fully merchandised: photographs taken, description written, listings live across every syndication feed. A ready unit nobody can see is an aging unit.
Repricing frequency and magnitude against the store's own policy, and whether markdowns are actually happening at the intervals the policy claims.
Which units get wholesaled, what they were bought for, what they cost to recondition, and what the pattern says about acquisition. Wholesale losses are a buying report card that most stores never read.
Most stores can tell you an average reconditioning time. Almost none can tell you the distribution, and the distribution is the whole story: a five-day average made of mostly two-day units and a handful of three-week disasters is a different operation from one where everything takes five days, and it calls for a different fix.
Instrumenting the stages takes real work — it usually means timestamps that the DMS does not natively capture and a short discipline change in the shop. We are direct about that during scoping, because a client who is not willing to make the process change should not pay for the reporting that depends on it. Where the timestamps do exist, this is typically the single highest-return report in the engagement.
What we will not claim. We can tell you where days are being lost and what they cost in depreciation and holding. We cannot tell you what a unit would have sold for had it been ready sooner — that number requires assumptions we would be inventing. Reporting that quantifies a counterfactual to two decimal places is selling confidence, not information.
| Source | What it contributes |
|---|---|
| DMS | Stock records, acquisition cost and date, internal recon repair orders, sale and wholesale transactions. |
| Inventory management | Pricing history, market rankings, days on lot as the merchandising tools count it, and syndication status. |
| Guide and market data | Market value over time, so cost-to-market is measured against a moving market rather than a stale appraisal. |
| Auction platforms | Purchase records, fees, and transport, which is where landed cost usually diverges from hammer price. |
| Recon workflow tools | Stage timestamps where a dedicated tool is in use. Where none is, we work with the store on the minimum viable set of touchpoints. |
| Photography and merchandising | Photo counts, timestamps, and description completeness, which turn merchandising readiness into a measurable date rather than an impression. |
Typical engagements run six to ten weeks for a single rooftop where inventory and DMS data are already accessible, and longer where recon stage instrumentation has to be established first.
Inventory management tools are good at pricing and market position, and we read from them rather than replacing them. What they do not do is join their view to your DMS cost detail, your internal recon repair orders, and your acquisition records to produce a landed cost with recon charged against the buyer who sourced the unit. That join is the work.
Partly, and we will tell you exactly which parts. Without stage timestamps we can still measure total recon duration, spend against estimate, and true days in inventory — useful on its own. The stage breakdown needs capture points that do not exist yet, so we scope that as a separate decision rather than quietly delivering a report built on guesses.
Most DMS reporting counts from stock-in, which is an administrative event. We count from acquisition — the date you took ownership and started paying for the unit. In stores that have never measured the gap it is commonly five to ten days, all of it depreciation nobody was attributing to anything.
Yes, and groups that trade units between stores need it more than anyone. Transfers are tracked so age follows the vehicle rather than resetting at the receiving store, and a unit's full history stays intact across the move. Resetting the clock on transfer is one of the more common ways a group's aging report flatters itself.
Where the platform allows it, yes — purchase records, fees, and transport, so landed cost is real rather than hammer price plus an assumption. Where an integration is not available we ingest the statements on a schedule, which is slower but gets to the same number.
Send us ninety days of used vehicle stock and recon repair order data. We will show you the stage breakdown before you commit to anything.
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K Auto Tech