Accounting Settings
Accounting Settings sit under Setup, and they tell Dealersip which accounts to use for the entries it posts automatically. When you save a sale, a purchase or a trade-in, Dealersip has to know which account each side of that entry lands in, and these settings are where that is decided. They also set the dealership's financial year.
Dealersip presets the most suitable account for each one, so a new dealership works out of the box. You only need to change them if your chart of accounts is set up differently. For how those entries are built, see Accounting.
Financial Year
Choose the dealership's financial year — April to March, for example, or whichever start your country and business use. This sets the default reporting window across the accounting reports and the Business Health dashboard.
Accounting Defaults
The accounts Dealersip fills in for its automatic entries, in three groups.
General
- Account Payable — where a bill you owe a supplier is recorded, and where a trade-in debt sits (see below).
- Account Receivable — where money a customer owes you is recorded.
- Bank Account — the default bank account for money received or paid by bank.
- Cash Account — the default cash account for cash received or paid.
Purchase
- Purchase Account — where the cost of a vehicle you buy is recorded.
- Reconditioning Cost Account — where reconditioning spend on a vehicle is recorded. Dealersip keeps this separate from the purchase account by default. If you would rather fold reconditioning into the purchase cost, choose your Purchase Account in both settings.
Sale
- Sale Account — where vehicle sale income is recorded.
- Discount On Sale Account — where a discount given on a sale is recorded, reducing revenue.
- Trade In Payable Account — where the debt for a customer's trade-in is recorded. Set this to the same account as Account Payable — the next section explains why.
- Finance Company Receivable — where money a finance company owes you on a financed deal is recorded.
- Owner Payables (Consignee Sale) — where the amount owed to the vehicle's owner is recorded when you sell a consignment vehicle.
- Commission (Consignee Sale) — where your commission income on a consignment sale is recorded.
Business Health Signals
The Business Health dashboard puts a Good, Watch or Risk badge on almost every figure it shows. This section is where you decide what counts as a warning.
These are settings rather than fixed rules because the right numbers depend on your trade. A new-vehicle franchise runs a much tighter margin than a used lot; a cash lot collects far faster than one selling on finance. A single fixed set would leave whole kinds of dealership sitting on a permanent Risk badge, which teaches everyone to ignore the badges altogether.
These signals are shared across your whole business. They are not set per dealership, so changing a number here changes the badges on every dealership's Business Health dashboard.
Watch is the first warning and Risk is the serious one, so each pair must read Watch before Risk. If you set a Watch beyond its own Risk the settings are refused rather than badging backwards, with a message naming the pair — for example "The receivables Watch days cannot be higher than the Risk days."
Every field prints its shipped default underneath. Leave a field blank to put it back to that default.
Getting paid
- Customers take longer than (days) — Watch and … and Risk — how many days your customers take to pay before the Receivables tile warns. Dealersip works this out as your receivables divided by your average daily sales over the last twelve months, so it measures collection speed, not size: a large receivable is not automatically a problem, a slow one is. Defaults: 45 and 60 days.
- Unpaid past 90 days, share of what you are owed (%) — Watch and … and Risk — how much of your receivable balance may be more than 90 days old before Dealersip raises a flag about it. Defaults: 10% and 25%.
Margin and running costs
- Vehicle cost as a share of sales (%) — Watch and … and Risk — what the vehicles you sell may cost, as a share of what you sell them for, before the Cost of goods and Gross margin figures warn. This is the setting that differs most between trades. Defaults: 85% and 90%.
- Running costs as a share of sales (%) — Watch and … and Risk — what your overheads — rent, salaries, advertising and the rest — may come to as a share of sales before Operating expenses warns. Defaults: 12% and 18%.
- Flag an expense group growing faster than sales by (%) — Dealersip watches which kind of expense is growing fastest and flags it when it outpaces your sales growth by more than this. Default: 20%.
Cash and stock
- Cash must cover what you owe (times) — how many times over your cash should cover your payables for the Cash & Bank tile to read healthy. At the default of 1, cash simply has to match what you owe. Default: 1.
- Stock over 90 days, share of your own stock (%) — Watch and … and Risk — how much of your own stock, by value, may be more than 90 days old before the Inventory tile warns. Consignment vehicles are excluded, because that money was never yours. Defaults: 25% and 40%.
- Judge the selling rate on the last (days) — the recent window Dealersip uses to work out how fast you are selling, which is what turns your stock into "about so many days of supply". A short window reacts quickly but swings about; a long one is steadier. Default: 90 days.
- Ignore wrong-side balances under — Dealersip flags an account sitting on the wrong side, such as a bank account in credit. Below this amount it treats the balance as rounding rather than a mistake, so small stray figures do not clutter the flags. Default: 100 — or 5,000 in India, where vehicles priced in lakhs would otherwise flag every stray rupee.
One thing you cannot change here is the 30 / 60 / 90 day ageing bands. Those are built into the dashboard's columns, its colour bands and its drill-downs, so "over 90 days" means the same thing everywhere. The 60-day mark that decides when a finance company is late funding a deal is tied to the same bands for the same reason.
Which account to pick for Trade-in Payable
Short answer: the same account you use for Accounts Payable.
Here is why, in the order it happens:
- A customer trades in their car. You record that car as a purchase, so it enters your stock and can be resold.
- That purchase says you owe someone for the car, and it puts that debt in your Accounts Payable account.
- When you invoice the new car, the trade-in wipes out that debt — the customer settles it by giving you the car instead of cash.
Step 3 has to clear the debt in the same account step 2 created it in. If the sale clears it somewhere else, nothing cancels:
- The other account ends up with a debit balance — a debt owed to you, which never happened.
- Accounts Payable stays too high by the same amount — a bill no supplier will ever claim.
- Your total payables still looks right, because the two errors are equal and opposite. That is what makes it easy to miss.
- Neither account can be reconciled against anything, and it gets worse with every trade-in you take.
Dealersip now always uses your Accounts Payable account for both sides, so new sales cannot get this wrong.
If your older entries used a different account
Entries already posted keep the account they were posted with. There are two ways to clean them up.
Preferred — re-save the sale. Open the affected sale and save it again. Dealersip rebuilds its accounting entry using the correct account, and both sides cancel. Do this whenever the sale can still be edited.
If the sale cannot be re-saved (a closed period, or a locked record), post a Journal instead. Say the stranded amount is 7,345,000:
Dr Accounts Payable 7,345,000 (party = the customer)
Cr Trade in Payables 7,345,000
Read it as: the trade-in debt was never really a supplier bill, so take it out of Accounts Payable, and close off the other account that was left sitting on the wrong side. Use the same amount that is stranded, and tag the same customer so their ledger stays true.
After either fix, the old trade-in account should read zero. Accounts cannot be hidden from the pickers, so rename it — putting something like "do not use" in the name — to stop anyone selecting it by hand later.