End-of-Month Reports Every Used Car Dealer Should Run

Month end is when you find out what actually happened. Cars sold, money spent, deposits taken, taxes owed. If you skip the review, minor errors pile up until tax time, and then they are hard to untangle. A steady routine of a handful of reports takes a short session each month and pays for itself in problems caught early.

Here is a practical order to work through, and what to look for in each report.

1. Sales report

Start with what sold. List every sale for the month with date, vehicle, buyer, price and salesperson. Confirm the count matches your memory and your paperwork. If you remember selling a car that is not on the list, find out why before you move on.

2. Pending sales report

Pending deals are sales that are in motion but not final, perhaps waiting on funding, a lien holder or the customer. Review each one and ask whether it will actually close. Deals that have been pending for weeks may need a phone call or may need to go back to available.

3. Profit and loss report

This is the report most dealers care about. Check gross profit on the cars sold, then the expenses for the month. Look at the cars with unusually low or negative profit and ask what happened. Was a repair bill missed at the time, was the price too low, or was the purchase simply a mistake?

Compare the month with the prior one. A single month can be noisy, but a trend of shrinking profit per car deserves attention.

4. Vehicles purchased report

Review what you bought. Check each car's purchase price and fees against your receipts. This is also where you notice whether you are buying more than you are selling, which ties up cash.

5. Inventory report

Look at everything still on hand, with its age and status. Sort by days on lot. Cars that have been sitting the longest are the ones to reprice, wholesale or promote. Check that statuses are right, so a car that is sold is not still listed as In Stock, and a car in the shop is shown as In Service.

6. Tax and fees report

Sales tax and government fees collected from customers are not yours to keep. Run the tax and fees report and compare the totals to what you will remit to your state. If anything looks off, trace it back to the specific deal. Your accountant or state agency can tell you filing dates and requirements for your location.

7. Deposits, repairs and salesman reports

• Deposits: confirm that every deposit on the report matches a car on hold, and follow up on old ones.
• Repairs: review what you spent on repair work and which vendors you used. Look for cars where repairs ate most of the margin.
• Salesman: if you pay commission, use this report to calculate it, and keep a copy with payroll records.

Make it a habit

Pick a day, such as the first business day after month end, and run the same reports in the same order every time. Export the results to Excel or CSV, or print them, and keep them in a folder by month. Send copies to your accountant. A consistent routine makes year-end much less stressful.

What to do when numbers do not match

If a report total looks wrong, work backward. Pick one deal or one car, open its record and compare each figure with the paper receipt or invoice. Most mismatches come from a missing expense, a wrong status or a deal entered with the wrong date. Fix the record, rerun the report and note what you learned so the same mistake does not repeat next month.

How DMS Apex helps

DMS Apex includes reports for sales, pending sales, profit and loss, vehicles purchased, inventory, tax and fees, salesman, deposits and repairs, and each can be exported to Excel or CSV or printed. Because costs, auction fees and repairs are recorded on each car, and deals, deposits and trade-ins are linked to it, the reports come from the data you already entered. Your dealership has a private database. It is $28 per month flat with a 15-day free trial and no contract.