Manage heavy equipment & machinery sales with precision

For a distributor of excavators, generators, compressors or forklifts, the serial number is the only identifier that survives the life of the asset. Customers change. Sites change. Rental contracts end. The machine keeps going, and the question a service manager gets asked ten years later is what has already been done to it.

Because the record is attached to the unit, the parts counter can also answer the other version of that question. Somebody calls with a model and a serial, and the system already knows which filter, seal or pump fits it, rather than the counter staff working it out from a paper catalogue.

Warranty work is where equipment distributors lose money quietly. The sale is booked, the commission is paid, and eighteen months of unbilled service visits follow. Unless those visits carry a cost, the margin report keeps showing the sale as a good one.

The same structure covers claims back to the manufacturer. What you recovered sits next to what the job cost, so the gap is visible per claim rather than netted off somewhere at year end.

Parts inventory is where the working capital of an equipment business sits. Some of it turns every month. A large share of it was bought for a machine that has since left the country and will never move again. Both look the same on a stock report that only shows quantity and value.

Once consumption is tracked per part and tied to the machines in the field, you can separate the two. That changes what you order from the principal at the start of the year, which is usually the biggest single cash decision the business makes.

Most equipment businesses in the region drift into rental rather than plan for it. A customer cannot finance a purchase, a machine is idle, and a rental arrangement gets written on a delivery note. Two years later nobody can say whether the rental side makes money.

The pieces that make it answerable are unremarkable: which unit went where, for how long, what came back damaged, what it cost to put right, and what depreciation the machine carried over the same period.

Fixed assets and after-sales work off the same record here, which is the point. Depreciation is an accounting entry in most systems and service history is an operations file, and the two never meet. When they sit on the same unit, the total cost of a machine over five years is a report rather than a project.

The caveat worth stating: hour meter readings and site conditions still have to be entered by someone. Wizard will not read a machine's telematics feed on its own, so service intervals based on running hours are only as current as the last reading a technician typed in.