Sell, track & manage tires and batteries at scale

Tire and battery businesses carry catalogues that break most systems. A few hundred sizes, several brands per size, and a naming convention that varies depending on which supplier's list it was copied from. When the item file is a long list of similar text strings, finding stock becomes a skill rather than a task.

The cost of that is quiet. A caller wants 265/65 R17, the counter says no, and the branch across town has fourteen of them. Nobody records the lost sale, so it never appears in any report, and the same thing happens the next day.

Holding specifications as real fields also cleans up the reporting. You can look at what sold by rim size or by battery capacity instead of by product name, which is the only way to see what your market actually buys.

The claim itself is rarely the expensive part. What costs money is the second half nobody tracks: the credit you gave the customer, the unit you sent back to the supplier, and whether the supplier ever credited you for it.

When the serial carries its own history, that loop can be closed. You can see which units went out under which batch, how many came back, and which supplier claims are still open. A batch with an unusual failure rate becomes visible early rather than after you have replaced fifty of them.

Serial tracking only pays off if the number is captured at the point of sale. A workshop counter under pressure will skip it, and every skipped serial is a claim you will end up settling on trust later.

Capital tied up in dead sizes is the most common financial problem in tire distribution. It rarely shows in the accounts as a loss, because the stock is still valued at cost right up to the day someone finally admits it will not sell.

Ageing reports change the timing of that decision. A size that has not moved in six months is a promotion. The same size after two years is a write-down. The difference between those two outcomes is entirely a matter of when somebody looked.

This works alongside rotation rather than replacing it. Older units should leave first, which is a warehouse discipline, and the report is what tells you when the discipline is not holding.

In a B2B tire and battery business the price is the relationship, and that is exactly why it drifts. A regular workshop negotiates with one branch, mentions it at another, and within a year the same customer has three prices depending on who serves them.

Credit works the same way. Terms and limits belong to the customer rather than to the branch, so a workshop that is behind on payment does not simply drive twenty minutes to a colleague who has not heard about it.

The system will not make the commercial decision for you. Someone still has to decide what a fleet deserves against a small garage, and whether the volume being bought justifies it. What changes is that the decision is written down once instead of renegotiated at every counter.

Consignment is normal in this trade and it is where a lot of stock quietly disappears. Units sit at fifteen workshops, each holding a slightly different quantity than anyone believes, and reconciliation happens once a year if at all.

Keeping consigned stock in the inventory records at least makes the exposure countable. You can see how much value is sitting outside your own walls, which workshops hold the most, and how long it has been there.

Be realistic about what this does and does not solve. It gives you a number to check against, but somebody still has to go and count.

Ordering in this business is done in containers, months ahead, against a season that has not happened yet. Getting it wrong in one direction means empty shelves in the busiest weeks. Getting it wrong in the other means capital sitting in a warehouse until the date codes embarrass you.

History by size is the honest input. Not what sold overall, but what sold in each branch, in which months, and at what margin after discount. That is usually available in a distributor's records and almost never assembled, because pulling it together by hand takes a week.

No ERP forecasts your season. What it can do is put last year's numbers, current stock, open purchase orders and supplier lead times in front of the buyer at the same time, which is more than most tire distributors have when they place the order.