Many small businesses lean on their accountant for more than the year-end statements. The firm keeps the books, runs the payroll, chases a few debtors and, in practice, knows the business's customers almost as well as the owner does. So when a business starts using Achekam's Industry CRM, a natural question follows: can the accountant work in it too, and if so, who is in charge?

The answer is yes, the firm can, and the business stays in charge. This article explains how the two fit together and what to settle with your firm before it starts.

The firm already works in your ledger

On Achekam, a business appoints its accounting firm by the firm's Achekam address or firm code, as accountant, auditor, tax practitioner, payroll provider or adviser, with an access level, and the firm accepts or declines.

Once appointed, the firm works directly in the business's own ledger. No copy is made. What the firm posts appears in the business's own accounting screens, and what the business records is what the firm sees. There is one set of books, not a client version and an accountant's version.

That is the foundation for the Industry CRM. Because the CRM lives inside the same books, a firm already working there is in the right place to help with it.

Using the Industry CRM in your books

An accounting firm working in a business's books can use the Industry CRM there. It does so as part of its appointment to your books, not from its own workspace: the Industry CRM is for business workspaces only, and an accounting firm's own workspace does not see it.

What that looks like in practice depends on what you ask of the firm. Some businesses will want their accountant to help set the CRM up: checking that the pack's ledger accounts sit sensibly in the chart, or going through its starter catalogue with you. Others will want the firm to do routine work in it, such as following up overdue customers or preparing invoices for the owner to approve. Each industry pack sets its own records, workflows, document requests, reminders, catalogue, ledger accounts and home-page counts, so the firm sees the same industry-specific screens your staff do.

Only your administrator decides the big things

Three decisions are reserved for the business's own administrator:

• Switching the Industry CRM on. The firm cannot start it in your books on your behalf.
• Changing industry. Moving from one pack to another is your decision alone.
• Granting its authorities. Where the add-on asks for someone to be given authority, only your administrator can grant it.

These limits are deliberate. A firm may advise you to switch on, or recommend a different pack, but the decision, and the record of it, stays with the business. A firm cannot reshape how you sell, or take on powers in your sales system, without you. The rule protects the firm as well: an accountant that cannot switch packs or grant authorities is plainly not the one who made such a change, which keeps the professional relationship clear.

Access levels and your own security rules

The access level you chose when appointing the firm still governs what its people can do in your books. Bookkeeping access covers the accounting but not your users, settings or payment gateways. Review access is read-only.

Your own security rules apply to the firm too. A firm member opening your books must meet your business's own IP allowlist and two-factor rules. If you require two-factor sign-in for your staff, the firm's people meet the same standard when they work in your books. Access levels and sign-in rules like these are internal controls, and Investopedia's guide to internal controls explains how such processes keep financial records accurate and help prevent fraud.

If the relationship ends, either side can end the appointment. The firm then loses access, and the books stay with the business.

What to agree with your firm

The software settles who can do what. A short written agreement settles who will do what. Before the firm starts working in your Industry CRM, agree:

1. The scope. Is the firm helping with set-up, doing routine work, or both?
2. Who prices the catalogue. Starter items carry no prices; decide whether you or the firm sets them.
3. Who reviews the starter wording. Every agreement in a pack is starter wording to review before use. If the firm is not the right reviewer, say who is.
4. Who issues invoices. Decide whether the firm prepares invoices for you to issue, or issues them itself.
5. How the firm is paid for the extra work. CRM work is not bookkeeping; agree the fee basis up front.
6. What happens to the work if the appointment ends. Your books stay with you; agree how any work in progress is handed back.

Put the answers in your engagement letter or a short side letter, so that both sides can refer to them.

A quick check before you start

• Confirm the firm's appointment and access level are what you intend.
• Make sure your IP allowlist and two-factor settings are set the way you want them for everyone, including the firm.
• Name your administrator, since only they can switch the CRM on, change industry or grant authorities.

How the firm's access ends, and what stays with you, is covered in changing accountants: your books stay with you. For read-only access from the firm's side, see accountant review access, and for how a firm accepts your appointment, accepting a client appointment.

Before you switch the Industry CRM on, have a short conversation with your accountant about the six points above. It will save a longer one later.

A dealership that carries its showroom stock on a finance facility pays interest every day a vehicle sits unsold. The lender, though, sends its statement when it sends it: sometimes in the first week of the next month, sometimes well into the second. If the bookkeeper waits for that statement before recording anything, last month's management accounts show a profit that never carried its finance cost, and the following month carries two months of interest.

For a dealer whose margin on a vehicle can be eaten by a few slow weeks in stock, that distortion matters. It hides exactly the cost that tells you which vehicles are sitting too long. This article explains how to put the interest into the right month with an accrual, and how to tidy it up once the lender's figure lands.

Interest belongs to the month it runs

The accruals idea is simple: an expense belongs to the period in which it was incurred, not the period in which the paperwork arrives. AccountingTools uses this exact case as an example, listing interest owed on a loan before the lender's invoice arrives among the classic accruals, alongside wages earned before month end and goods delivered before the supplier's invoice. Investopedia's list of accrued expenses likewise includes interest on loans that has been incurred but not yet invoiced or paid.

For a dealership, the stock finance facility is usually the largest of these. Others worth checking at month end include interest on a workshop equipment loan, on a vehicle used as a demonstrator under finance, and on any overdraft charged in arrears.

Estimating before the statement arrives

You do not need the lender's statement to make a sound estimate. You need the facility agreement and your own stock records:

1. The balance. Take the amount drawn on the facility for each financed vehicle, and note when each was drawn and when each sale settled it.
2. The rate. Use the rate in the facility agreement, including any margin over the reference rate and any change notified during the month.
3. The days. Count the days each vehicle was financed within the month.
4. The fees. Add any fixed monthly charges the agreement specifies, such as an administration fee.

Multiply balance by rate by days for each vehicle, add them up, and that is your accrual. A dealer with many vehicles on the facility can do the same calculation on the average daily balance instead.

Investopedia notes that an accrued expense can be an estimate and may differ from the invoice that arrives later. That is expected. The goal is a figure close enough that the month's profit is meaningful, not one that matches the lender to the last cent.

Reversing entries, so it is not counted twice

Here is the trap. You accrue the interest at month end. In the next month the lender's statement arrives and someone records it as an expense in the ordinary way. Now the interest is in the books twice.

AccountingTools recommends recording most accruals as reversing entries, so that the accrual is cancelled in the following period when the actual invoice is recorded. The pattern, in words:

• End of month one: debit interest expense, credit accrued expenses, with the estimate.
• Start of month two: the mirror image: debit accrued expenses, credit interest expense, with the same amount.
• When the statement arrives in month two: record the lender's actual charge as interest expense in the ordinary way.

Month one carries the estimate. Month two carries the actual charge minus the estimate, which is the small difference between them, plus month two's own interest once that is accrued in turn.

Closing the month in Achekam

In Achekam, a business posts the accrual as a manual journal. A journal that does not balance is refused, and so is one dated in a closed month, so the accrual has to go in before the month is closed. A posted journal can only be corrected by a reversal, which keeps the audit trail intact: if the estimate was keyed wrongly, you reverse it and post it again rather than editing it.

Make the mirror-image journal a fixed step on your month-start checklist: post it as a manual journal dated in the new month, with a description that names the accrual it cancels, so anyone reading the ledger can pair the two.

Months can then be soft-closed, hard-closed and locked. A closed month refuses postings from every source, and reopening a hard close needs a second approver. Before closing, the screen checks the ledger balances and that no posting suggestions, unposted bills or unmatched bank lines are waiting. That makes a natural month-end order: post the accruals, clear the waiting items, then close.

The management accounts show an income statement for the chosen period beside the period before, and a balance sheet at period end, both added up from the business's own journals and exportable as PDF or CSV. With the accrual in place, finance cost appears in the month it belongs to, and the comparison with the previous month is fair. One detail to know: the year-to-date preset starts on 1 January rather than on the business's own year start.

Truing up when the statement lands

When the lender's statement arrives, compare it with your estimate before recording it. Differences usually come from one of a few places:

• a vehicle sold late in the month whose settlement reached the lender a day or two after you assumed;
• a rate change you missed;
• a fee the agreement allows that you did not include;
• a vehicle drawn on the facility that never reached your stock list.

The first three are worth noting so next month's estimate is better. The last is worth investigating properly, because a vehicle on the lender's records but not on yours is a stock question, not an interest question.

For keeping each financed vehicle visible while it sits, see used vehicles in stock, and if the facility is up for renewal, the cash forecast a bank wants covers what lenders ask to see. AccountingTools explains the accruals concept and why most accruals are best set up as reversing entries.

Once the routine is in place, it becomes a short monthly task, and the finance cost of slow stock stops hiding in the following month's figures.

The customer has collected the car, paid for the service by card, and driven off. Two days later they phone: their banking app shows the same amount twice. The service adviser is sure only one payment went through. The cashier remembers the terminal hanging and being restarted. Nobody kept the first slip.

A double charge is one of the most avoidable problems at a workshop counter, and one of the most damaging when it is handled slowly. The customer feels cheated over money they did not owe, and if they go to their bank before you put it right, a simple mistake becomes a formal card dispute. This article explains how double charges happen, how to catch them at the counter, and what to do when one slips through.

How a double charge happens

Most duplicates come from a handful of moments:

• The retry. The terminal seems to stall, so the cashier cancels and starts again. The first attempt had in fact been approved.
• The re-key. The amount is entered, the customer is slow with the PIN, the screen times out, and the cashier keys it again without checking the result of the first.
• Two slips, two entries. The terminal prints a merchant copy and a customer copy, and both are treated as separate payments when the day is reconciled.
• The second terminal. A busy workshop has two machines, and a payment is started on one and finished on the other.

Visa warns merchants about exactly these patterns. It says that entering the same transaction into a terminal more than once, depositing both the merchant and bank copies of a receipt, or depositing the same transaction with more than one merchant bank can all result in duplicate transaction disputes. Visa's dispute resolution guidance for businesses explains what disputes are, why cardholders raise them and how a business can prevent and answer them.

Why a duplicate turns into a dispute

Visa defines a dispute as the reversal of the value, or part of the value, of a transaction by the card issuer to the acquirer and, usually, by the merchant bank to the merchant. In plain terms: the customer's bank takes the money back, and your bank takes it from you.

The timing is what hurts. Stripe, describing how disputes work on its platform, states that while a dispute is open a business cannot issue a refund outside the dispute process, and that each dispute raises the business's dispute rate with that card network. Your own acquiring bank will have its own rules, so ask it how it handles a refund once a dispute is lodged. The lesson holds either way: the moment to fix a duplicate is before the customer calls their bank.

Checking before the customer leaves

The cheapest control is a quick look at the terminal before the customer walks away. If the terminal hesitated, misbehaved or was restarted at any point in the payment, check its last few transactions on screen or on a short report. If two approvals for the same amount appear close together, sort it out while the customer is still at the counter, with the customer watching.

At an Achekam till, a card payment is recorded by the cashier from the bank terminal's slip, because the till has no link to any card machine. That separation is useful here. The till holds one record per sale; the terminal holds one record per approval. When the two disagree, the difference is your duplicate.

Build that comparison into the day:

A live X report of an open till and a Z report frozen at cash-up can both be opened as PDFs, so the comparison can be printed and initialled by whoever does it.

Refunding the extra charge

If the customer was charged twice and the till recorded the sale once, the till does not need to change: it already shows the correct position. The extra charge is reversed on the bank's terminal, using the terminal's refund or void function as your bank provides it. Stripe states that a business can issue more than one refund against a charge but cannot refund more than the original charge. The same common-sense limit applies at your terminal: refund exactly the duplicate amount, once, against the duplicate approval.

If the till also recorded the payment twice, for example because the sale was rung up again after the terminal stalled, correct the till too. In Achekam a supervisor or manager can refund all or part of a till sale, with a reason, as its own document linked to the original sale, and any goods are put back into stock. Use a reason that says what happened, such as "duplicate sale rung after terminal restart", so the refund makes sense when someone reviews it later.

Keep the terminal's refund slip with the original slips and a printout of any till refund, so the trail can be followed in either direction.

When the customer calls days later

If the duplicate is only discovered when the customer phones, act the same day:

1. Ask for the date, the amount and the last four digits of the card.
2. Pull that day's terminal batch report and Z report and look for two approvals.
3. If the duplicate is confirmed, refund it on the terminal and tell the customer when they can expect to see it.
4. Write a short note of the call, the evidence and the refund, and file it with the day's cash-up papers.
5. If the customer says they have already disputed it with their bank, contact your acquiring bank before refunding, so you do not pay the money back twice.

A routine for the counter

The routine that prevents most duplicates is short: never re-key a payment until you have checked whether the first one went through; always look at the result on the terminal screen, not just whether a slip printed; keep one terminal per payment; and reconcile the terminal to the till at midday and at cash-up.

For the basics of recording terminal payments at the till, see recording card payments from the bank terminal. If a dispute does arrive, the chargeback dispute timeline explains how it unfolds.

A customer who sees a duplicate fixed at the counter rarely remembers it. A customer who has to chase it remembers the workshop for the wrong reason.

A buyer has chosen a car and wants to secure it today. They reach for a credit card and offer to put the whole deposit on it. For the salesperson, it is the easiest close of the week. For the dealership, it may be the most expensive way that money could have arrived.

Card fees are easy to ignore on a parts sale or a service invoice. On a vehicle deposit, or a full cash purchase, the same fee structure produces a number that someone in the finance office will eventually notice. This article explains why, and how a dealer in South Africa, Nigeria or Kenya can steer large payments to a cheaper route without losing the sale.

A percentage fee on a big number

Investopedia describes the interchange fee as the fee a merchant pays when a customer pays by credit or debit card. It goes mostly to the card issuer, is set by the card networks such as Visa and Mastercard, and is usually calculated as a percentage of the transaction plus a fixed fee.

The important word is percentage. A fixed fee is the same whether the customer buys wiper blades or a bakkie. A percentage grows with the amount, so the cost of accepting a card scales directly with the size of the payment.

Investopedia's worked example is American, but it shows the mechanics clearly. On a $100 card sale at a 2% interchange rate, the merchant pays $2, of which $0.25 might go to the merchant's bank, $0.15 to the card network and $1.60 to the card issuer, leaving the merchant $98. Investopedia notes that actual rates are set by the networks and vary. No equivalent public figures are given here for South Africa, Nigeria or Kenya, so ask your acquiring bank for your own merchant fee schedule and read it with a vehicle deposit in mind.

Why some cards cost more than others

Not every card swipe costs the same. Investopedia lists the factors that move interchange: the type of card, debit or credit; how it is used, such as chip, PIN or tap; whether the transaction is online or in person; and the merchant's industry. It adds that credit cards generally carry higher interchange fees than debit cards, and that premium cash-back and travel rewards cards charge high fees.

That last point matters in a showroom. The customer most likely to offer a premium rewards card for a large deposit is often the one whose card costs the dealer the most to accept. The customer is collecting points; the dealer is funding them.

For a fuller explanation of how the fee is built up, Investopedia's guide to interchange fees walks through the parties involved and the factors that drive the rate.

Bank transfer with a reference

For a large deposit, a bank transfer is usually the cheaper and cleaner route. The customer pays directly into the dealership's account, the amount arrives in full apart from whatever your own bank charges for receiving it, and the payment reference ties it to the deal.

Two practices make transfers safe:

• One reference per deal. Give the customer a reference that names the vehicle or the deal, not just their surname, so the deposit cannot be confused with another buyer's.
• Cleared funds before release. A screenshot of a transfer, or a proof of payment PDF, is not money in the bank. Release nothing until the amount appears on your bank statement.

When the deposit is invoiced, Achekam's pay page can show the business's bank details and a payment reference, and a staff member marks the payment received once it shows on the bank statement. Each bank account in Achekam takes one currency, which keeps rand, naira or shilling deposits in the account that matches them.

At the counter: recording the transfer

Some buyers prefer to pay on the spot, from their phone, while standing at the sales desk. If the dealership uses Achekam's till for counter payments, the till shows the business's bank details and a reference for a bank transfer, and the sale is refused until the cashier records the bank's reference. That stops a transfer from being recorded on trust alone.

The routine at the desk:

1. Ring up the deposit and choose bank transfer.
2. Show the customer the bank details and reference from the till.
3. Wait for the payment to reach the dealership's account, checked through your banking app by someone authorised to see it.
4. Record the bank's reference at the till to complete the sale.

Card slips from the terminal

Sometimes a card is the right answer: a small holding deposit, a buyer from out of town with no other option, or a customer who simply will not wait. When that happens, the payment is taken on the bank's terminal and then recorded at the Achekam till by the cashier from the terminal's slip, because the till is not connected to any card machine.

Keep the merchant copy, check that the amount on the slip matches what was recorded, and make sure the card payment and the deal it belongs to can be found together later. A large card deposit is also a large potential dispute if the deal falls through, so the paper trail matters more than it does for a service invoice.

Writing the policy down

A dealership that decides this case by case will make inconsistent choices under pressure. A short written policy helps the sales team:

• Bank transfer is the preferred method for deposits and full payments above an amount the dealership sets.
• Card is accepted for smaller amounts, or above that level only with a manager's approval.
• No vehicle is released against a proof of payment alone.
• Every deposit carries a reference that identifies the deal.

For how deposits and finance house settlements fit together, see deposits and finance house payments, and for transfers at the service desk, read bank transfers at the service counter.

The sale is the same whichever way the deposit arrives. The difference is how much of it the dealership keeps.

On most workshop counters there are two machines side by side: the till, and the card terminal the bank supplied. The cashier keys the amount into one, then into the other. Usually the two agree. Sometimes a digit slips, a declined card is recorded as paid, or a payment is taken on the terminal and never recorded at all. Nobody notices until the bank settlement does not match the day's takings, and by then the customer is long gone.

The answer is not to pretend the two machines are one. It is a short, consistent routine that makes every card payment visible twice and compares the two at the end of each shift. This article explains how card payments work at an Achekam till and how to build that routine.

Two machines that do not talk to each other

Achekam's till is not connected to any card machine. There is no card terminal integration, and none for services such as Yoco, SnapScan or Zapper. More broadly, the till does not drive card terminals, receipt printers, cash drawers, scales or a customer display.

So a card payment happens on the bank's terminal, and the cashier then records it at the till from the terminal's slip. The till trusts the cashier's entry, which is exactly why the order of steps matters.

Recording a card payment from the slip

The safe order at the counter is always the same:

1. Ring up the job or the parts at the till so the total is fixed.
2. Key that exact total into the card terminal.
3. Wait for the terminal to print an approved slip. A declined or cancelled slip is not a payment.
4. Only then record the card payment at the till, matching the slip's amount.
5. Keep the merchant copy of the slip with the day's paperwork.

If a customer splits a bill across two cards, or between card and cash, record each card payment separately, one per approved slip, so the count of slips and the count of card payments agree.

Refunds follow the same two-machine logic. A supervisor or manager refunds all or part of the sale at the till with a reason, which creates its own document linked to the original sale and puts any returned parts back into stock. Because the till cannot reach the card machine, the money itself goes back to the card on the bank's terminal. Keep the terminal's refund slip with a printout of the till's refund document so the pair can be checked together. A customer can also dispute a card payment with their bank well after the visit; Visa's dispute resolution page for merchants explains what a dispute is, why cardholders raise them and how a business can prevent and respond to them.

Card takings in their own account

Every till sale that reaches the server posts a balanced journal in the same step, with each payment method going to its own account. Card payments, along with QR payments, go to account 1060, separate from cash (1050) and bank transfers (1000).

That separation is what makes checking possible. When the bank pays out the day's card takings, the amount it deposits can be compared with what built up in account 1060, rather than with a mixed total of everything the counter took.

Checking slips against the X report

Achekam gives you two reports for a till, both available as PDFs:

• the X report, a live view of an open till at any point during the day; and
• the Z report, frozen at cash-up.

Use the X report as the midday check. Run the card terminal's own running total, run the till's X report, and compare the card figures. A difference found at lunchtime can usually be traced to the slip that caused it while the cashier still remembers the customer. The same difference found the next morning is much harder to explain.

Closing the day

At cash-up, the cashier counts the cash drawer by notes and coins, and the server works out the expected cash, records the difference and posts it to cash over and short. Card payments are not counted in the drawer; they are checked against the terminal's end-of-day total and the approved slips.

A branch's business day is then closed by a supervisor or manager who was not a cashier that day. Closing freezes the day's Z reports, payments, VAT by rate and differences, so nobody can quietly tidy up the figures afterwards.

A daily routine for the cashier

• Start of shift: check the terminal's date and time and that it is logged on to the right merchant account.
• Each card sale: till total first, approved slip second, record third.
• Midday: compare the terminal's running total with the X report.
• End of shift: terminal end-of-day total, slips in order, cash counted, differences explained in writing.
• Next morning: someone in accounts checks the bank's card settlement against the card payments recorded in account 1060.

When you would rather the customer paid without a slip

If a business sets up a payment gateway, a customer can instead pay at the till by scanning a QR code for that gateway's pay page, and the payment counts only after the server has confirmed it with the gateway. That avoids keying an amount twice, at the cost of the customer using their phone.

For customers paying by transfer, see bank transfers at the service counter; for Kenyan customers who prefer mobile money, M-Pesa prompts when a customer collects their car explains the prompt-to-phone route.

A dealership can be selling well, showing a healthy gross margin on every unit, and still be short of cash every month end. The reason is usually not profit. It is time: the gap between the day money leaves the business to buy a vehicle or a box of parts, and the day the money comes back from a customer or a finance house.

That gap has a name, and it can be measured from the books a dealer already keeps. Once it is measured, it can be managed. This article explains how to work it out, where the days hide in a dealership, and which levers shorten it without creating new problems.

Inventory days plus receivable days minus payable days

ACCA describes the cash operating cycle, also called the working capital cycle or the cash conversion cycle, as inventory days plus receivables days minus payables days. It is the number of days between paying suppliers and receiving cash from sales. ACCA's article on working capital management sets out the calculation and the thinking behind it.

In dealership terms:

• Inventory days: how long, on average, a vehicle or a part sits in stock before it is sold.
• Receivable days: how long, after a sale, the dealership waits to be paid.
• Payable days: how long the dealership takes to pay its own suppliers.

Add the first two, subtract the third, and you have the number of days your own cash is funding the business. The longer it is, the more working capital the dealership needs just to stand still.

Where the days come from in the books

Each component is a simple ratio, using figures from the management accounts:

• Inventory days: average inventory divided by cost of sales for the period, multiplied by the number of days in the period.
• Receivable days: trade receivables divided by sales on credit for the period, multiplied by the days in the period.
• Payable days: trade payables divided by purchases (or cost of sales, if purchases are not separated) for the period, multiplied by the days in the period.

Achekam's management accounts show an income statement for a chosen period beside the period before, and a balance sheet at the period end, both added up from the business's own journals and exportable as PDF or CSV. The balance sheet gives you inventory, receivables and payables; the income statement gives you sales and cost of sales. Export both to a spreadsheet and the ratios are quick to work out. Note that the year-to-date preset starts on 1 January, not on the dealership's own year start, so choose the period deliberately.

Calculate it monthly on the same basis and watch the trend rather than any single month.

Vehicles and parts sitting in stock

For most dealers, inventory days dominate. A used vehicle bought on trade-in starts costing money the day it arrives: finance cost if it is on a stock facility, reconditioning, insurance, and the opportunity cost of the cash. Parts carry their own version: slow-moving lines bought in bulk that sit on a shelf for months.

ACCA lists the advantages of holding inventory as meeting customer demand, taking bulk discounts and reducing total re-ordering cost, and the disadvantages as storage costs, the cost of capital tied up, and deterioration, obsolescence and theft. A dealership feels all of these. A model year change makes yesterday's stock older overnight; a part for a discontinued model may never sell.

Shortening inventory days usually means a clear ageing rule for used vehicles, with a price review or a wholesale decision at fixed points, and a parts buying policy that favours supplier delivery over holding stock for slow lines.

Customers and finance houses paying later

Receivable days in a dealership come from a few distinct sources: fleet and trade customers on account, insurers paying for repair work, and finance houses settling vehicle deals. Each has its own rhythm, so look at them separately rather than as one figure.

Achekam ages receivables into 0-30, 31-60, 61-90, 91-120 and over 120 days, with overdue totals. Read that report by customer type. A fleet customer drifting from the first column into the second is a conversation for this week. A finance house settlement that has not arrived after the deal was delivered is a paperwork problem to chase now, not at month end.

Paying suppliers later, and the risk in it

The tempting lever is the third one: pay suppliers more slowly, and the cycle shortens on paper. ACCA cautions that delaying payments to suppliers can backfire, because a powerful supplier may then demand cash on delivery. For a dealer, the parts distributor or the manufacturer is often exactly that kind of supplier. Lose your account terms and the cycle gets worse, not better.

The better approach is to pay on the agreed date, not before and not after. In Achekam a business records supplier bills line by line with VAT, a bill without a purchase order waits for approval before it posts, and a bill can be paid in full or in parts from a chosen bank account. Recording bills as they arrive, with their due dates, lets you plan payments to the date rather than paying whatever is on the desk.

The trade-off behind the number

ACCA explains that working capital management has two objectives, liquidity and profitability, and that they involve a trade-off, because funds tied up in working capital earn little or no return. A dealership with almost no stock has a short cycle and few sales. A dealership with a lot loses money to finance cost and ageing.

The goal is not the shortest possible cycle. It is a cycle you understand, measured the same way every month, with an explanation whenever it moves. For used stock specifically, see used vehicles in stock; for the broader concept, read working capital explained; and when the bank asks how you will fund the gap, the cash forecast a bank wants is the next step.

A dealer who knows the number can answer the bank manager's first question before it is asked.

The dealer principal has a good relationship with the bank, a solid sales record and a plan: a larger stock facility, or a term loan to refurbish the workshop. The credit manager listens politely and then asks for the same thing every lender asks for: a cash flow forecast.

Many dealerships produce one in a hurry, from a template, the week before the meeting. The bank can usually tell. A forecast that was built properly, from the dealership's own figures, with assumptions the bank can test, does far more for the application than a polished spreadsheet with numbers nobody can explain. This article sets out what lenders expect and where the figures come from.

Why the bank wants a forecast, and for how long

A lender's question is not whether the dealership is profitable. It is whether the dealership will have the cash to pay the instalments and stay within the facility, month after month. Profit and cash part company in a dealership more than in most businesses, because vehicles sit in stock, finance houses settle after delivery, and parts are bought ahead of jobs.

ICAEW notes that lenders will require cash flow forecasts with loan applications and for ongoing monitoring, usually for the next 12 months. ICAEW's nine principles of cash flow forecasting are a useful checklist for anyone preparing one.

Monthly for a year, weekly when it is tight

ICAEW notes that rolling monthly forecasts for the next 12 months are usually necessary, that rolling weekly forecasts for 13 weeks ahead are often used in turnarounds, and that both are often required for loan applications.

For a dealership the monthly view shows the seasonal shape of the year: the months when new model stock arrives, the quieter periods, the annual insurance and licence payments. The weekly view matters when cash is tight or the facility is close to its limit, because a month-end figure can hide a mid-month low point when the finance house has not yet paid and the parts account has.

Building it on the direct method

ICAEW recommends using the direct method where possible: show cash coming in and cash going out, in language a non-accountant understands, with the assumptions clearly documented. ICAEW notes that the indirect method, starting from profit and adjusting, is less easily understood, although it is a useful control.

A dealership forecast on the direct method might have these lines:

Cash in

• Vehicle sales: deposits and finance house settlements, by month of receipt, not month of sale
• Workshop and parts: cash and card takings, and collections from account customers
• Warranty and insurer claims, when they are paid
• Any new loan drawdown

Cash out

• Vehicle purchases and stock facility repayments
• Parts suppliers
• Salaries and statutory payments
• Rent, utilities, insurance and licences
• VAT and income tax payments in the months they fall due
• Loan instalments and interest
• Capital spending, such as workshop equipment

Assumptions the bank can test

Every line rests on an assumption, and the assumptions are what the credit manager will probe. Write them down next to the forecast: how many units a month, at what average deal value, how long the finance house takes to settle, what share of workshop sales is on account, and so on.

ICAEW advises producing worst-case, most-likely and best-case scenarios, including a prediction of the earliest date additional funding may be required. For a dealer, the useful worst case is specific: sales slow for a quarter, used stock ages, and a large fleet customer pays late. If the forecast shows the facility is still adequate under that scenario, the application is stronger. If it shows a shortfall, it is better that you find it than the bank.

What the books can supply

The forecast is a view of the future, but it should be anchored in the past. Achekam's management accounts show an income statement for a chosen period beside the period before, and a balance sheet at period end, both built from the dealership's own journals and exportable as PDF or CSV. Those give you the starting cash balance, the receivables and payables you will collect and pay in the first months, and a track record of sales and costs to base assumptions on. The year-to-date preset starts on 1 January, not on the business's own year start, so select the dealership's financial year deliberately.

A business can also set a budget per account and period in Achekam and compare it with actual figures from its ledger. A budget is not a cash forecast, but it is where the revenue and cost assumptions should agree. If the forecast assumes workshop revenue that the budget does not, one of them is wrong.

The statement the books do not produce

One limit is worth knowing before the meeting: Achekam's books do not produce a cash flow statement. The bank may want a historical cash flow statement alongside the annual financial statements, and that will come from your accountant. For the forecast itself, build the direct-method schedule in a spreadsheet, using the exported management accounts as the opening position.

Reporting once the facility is granted

The forecast does not end when the loan is approved. ICAEW recommends controls over cash flow reporting: reconcile reports to bank and creditor statements, show when they were prepared, have them reviewed by someone other than the preparer, and reconcile them to the profit and loss and balance sheet movements. ICAEW also advises checking forecasts against actuals to improve the process.

In practice, that means a monthly pack to the bank: the forecast for the month, what actually happened, and a short explanation of each significant difference. A lender that sees honest explanations month after month has fewer reasons to doubt the next forecast.

For how long the dealership's cash is tied up between stock and sale, see how long a dealership's cash is tied up; for the weekly view in more detail, read a rolling 13-week cash forecast.

The best time to build the forecast is before the bank asks for it, so that the conversation is about the plan rather than the spreadsheet.

A workshop that switches on Commerce & POS finds a busy set of screens: a till, a board for service jobs, a stock screen, sales figures along the top and a branch picker. They look equally finished. They are not. Some write to the server and post to the ledger. Others only draw on the screen and forget everything when the browser closes.

That difference matters most on a Monday morning, when the service adviser books in six vehicles and wants every job card to still be there on Friday. This article goes through the screens one by one and says which ones a workshop can lean on today.

The till is the part that reaches the books

The till is the solid piece. Only a business that holds the Point of Sale add-on sees it, and the server refuses till requests from a business without it, so nobody rings up sales by accident on a plan that does not include them.

When a sale reaches the server, it posts a balanced journal in the same step: the payment method to its own account, the revenue, the output VAT, and cost of sales against inventory at the product's cost price. The parts sold come off stock at the till's location at the same moment. If you sell a set of brake pads and a bottle of brake fluid over the counter, the books and the stock both know about it before the customer reaches the door.

The till also gives you a live X report while it is open and a Z report frozen at cash-up, both as PDFs. Those reports, not the figures across the top of the screen, are what to use when you count the day.

Service jobs and the Service Work Order mode keep nothing

The service jobs board in Commerce stores nothing, and the screen says so. A job you drag from "booked in" to "on the hoist" is not saved anywhere. Close the tab and it is gone.

The till has a Service Work Order mode as well, alongside Lay-by, Quotation, Sales Order, Delivery and Click & Collect. These modes are labels only. Whatever mode is showing, the till records an ordinary sale, paid in full. It cannot hold an open work order, take a deposit against it, or add parts to it over three days while the car waits for a gearbox.

So the till is where a job ends, at collection and payment. It is not where a job lives.

A stock screen that depends on the till being opened

The Stock & Inventory screen inside Commerce shows products only if the till was opened earlier in the same browser session. Its stock buttons change what you see on that screen and nothing else. A parts manager who "adjusts" a quantity there has adjusted a picture.

The list that is kept on the server is the Item Master in the Accounting menu. It holds each product's SKU, name, category, selling and cost price, opening quantity and VAT treatment. When you want to know what parts exist and what they cost, look there.

Sales figures and a branch picker to ignore

The sales totals across the top of the commerce screens count only the sales rung up in that browser since the page was opened, and they are always shown in rand. Two counter staff on two computers will see two different "today" figures, and a Kenyan or Nigerian workshop will see rand on a shilling or naira day. Treat those numbers as decoration and use the X and Z reports.

The branch picker is worse than decoration. It lists three invented South African branches instead of your own locations, and whichever name is chosen is sent with each sale. Pick one name, tell everyone to leave it alone, and do not build branch reporting on it until the picker lists your own sites.

Keeping job cards outside the till for now

Until the service screens store their work, keep the job card as a document. A simple routine:

1. Write the job card or estimate as a PDF or a document built from text blocks, with the customer's name, registration number, the work and the estimate.
2. Send it for the customer's electronic signature before the work starts. The signing console opens from the Sign button and the dashboard, and a signer from outside the business must be linked to a client or a CRM lead before the envelope goes out.
3. The signed PDF and its completion certificate are filed back into Documents. Keep one folder per month or per customer and tag each card with the registration number so you can search for it later.
4. When the customer collects, ring up the labour and parts at the till so stock and the ledger move.

In South Africa this routine also answers the law: section 15 of the Consumer Protection Act requires a workshop to give a repair estimate and get the customer's authorisation before doing work or charging for it, and the Acts Online text of section 15 sets out that duty. A signed estimate in Documents is a tidy way to show it was done.

Two other habits help. Card payments taken on the bank's terminal still have to be keyed at the till, which recording card slips at an unconnected till covers. And if a customer pays something up front for a big job, remember that the till cannot hold a deposit; why a deposit needs an invoice explains the route through receivables instead.

Where to go from here

Spend ten minutes walking a new service adviser through the table above, so nobody trusts the job board with a customer's car. Then decide how parts on a job should be charged, because typing them onto an invoice behaves differently from selling them at the till; why parts on a workshop invoice do not leave stock sets out the split that keeps stock right.

A regular customer walks up to the parts counter with a failed alternator in a carrier bag. "You sold me this," he says. The service adviser believes him, but where is the proof? The workshop's job history for his vehicle is on one side of the business; the counter, where he bought the part himself and fitted it at home, is on the other.

Dealerships live with this split every day. The Automotive pack in Achekam's Industry CRM keeps the workshop side on the customer's record, and its fourth wave brings the counter's sales onto the same timeline. This article explains how the two halves come together and what to do in the meantime so the adviser at the counter is never guessing.

Two places a customer spends money

A dealership customer can pay you in two quite different ways:

• At the workshop, where a service job is opened, worked on and invoiced.
• At the counter, where parts and accessories are rung up at the till and paid on the spot.

The till belongs to the Point of Sale add-on. A business that holds it rings up counter sales under Commerce & POS, and a business without it neither sees the till nor can use it. The Automotive pack does not replace the till; it is a CRM for the dealership's customers, built around vehicle sales with trade-ins, workshop service jobs with parts and labour, and test drives.

What the pack keeps on a service job

The workshop half is already well covered. A service job in the pack checks the vehicle in, has the customer sign the job card authorisation electronically, records the parts and labour used, and then either invoices the job card or claims the cost from the warranty or plan provider.

All of that sits on the customer's record, so an adviser opening the record sees every visit: what came in, what was signed, what was fitted and how it was paid for. For the full flow from booking in to collection, see the service job card in the Automotive pack.

Linking till sales to the customer's timeline

The fourth wave of the Industry CRM links till sales to the customer's timeline. Once it is on, a sale rung up at the counter for a known customer appears on that customer's record beside their service jobs and vehicle purchases. The alternator in the carrier bag stops being a matter of memory: the adviser opens the record and finds the counter sale, its date and what was paid.

The same wave also turns low stock into a reorder task and adds dashboards read from the ledger, so the parts manager sees the counter and the workshop drawing on the same shelves.

Till sales still post the same journals

Bringing a sale onto the timeline is about seeing it, not about how it is booked. The till keeps doing what it does today: every sale that reaches the server posts a balanced journal in the same step, with the payment method to its own account, revenue, output VAT, and cost of sales against inventory at the part's cost price.

That matters for your accountant. Nothing about the monthly figures changes because the CRM can now show a counter sale on a customer's page.

What a service adviser can look up meanwhile

Until the link is switched on, a few habits give the counter most of the same reach:

1. E-mail the receipt. The till receipt is a PDF made by the server from the posted sale, showing every payment, VAT by rate and your tax number. E-mailing it to the customer gives both of you a dated copy that can be searched for by name.
2. Use account sales for trade and fleet customers. A till sale can be charged to a trade customer's account, which writes a receivables invoice under that customer's name and checks the account's hold and credit limit unless a supervisor or manager overrides it with a reason. Trade customers are created on the Wholesale screen, which needs the Wholesale add-on. Those sales then appear on the customer's statement of account, which the server produces as a PDF.
3. File what matters. For a part with a long warranty, save the receipt into a Documents folder for that customer and tag it with the vehicle's registration number.
4. Write the receipt number on the job card. If a customer brings in a part they bought at your counter for the workshop to fit, note the counter receipt number on the job. The two records then point at each other.

Why the history is worth keeping

A counter sale can come back as a warranty claim long after the customer has forgotten when they bought it. In South Africa, the Consumer Protection Act gives a consumer an implied warranty of quality on goods, and the Acts Online text of section 56 sets out the right to return defective goods within six months for repair, replacement or a refund. Nigerian and Kenyan dealers face their own consumer rules and their suppliers' warranty terms, and the same point applies: the date of sale decides the answer.

Before the link arrives

Pick the two or three habits above that fit your counter and make them routine now, so the history is already there when the timeline starts collecting counter sales by itself. If you also sell vehicles, the vehicle sale pipeline shows how those deals sit on the same customer record, and parts on workshop invoices explains why parts are best sold through the till rather than typed onto an invoice.

The parts manager introduced weekly cycle counts to fix the stock records. Six months later the records are worse. The system says there are oil filters for a popular model on the shelf; the shelf is empty; the counter staff have stopped trusting the screen and walk to the bin before every quote. Each count found differences, each difference was adjusted, and yet the errors keep coming back.

This is a well-known trap, and it is not a reason to stop counting. It is a sign that the counts are being done in the wrong order, or that parts kept in more than one place are being counted as if they lived in one. This article explains why it happens and how to count a parts department properly.

How a correct count makes the record wrong

AccountingTools warns that if outstanding inventory transactions are not entered before a cycle count, a counter's adjustment followed by the late transaction can leave the record less accurate than before. It adds that this is particularly common when the same item is stored in multiple locations. AccountingTools' guide to cycle counting explains the problem and the counting practices that prevent it.

Here is how it plays out in a workshop. On Tuesday morning a technician takes two sets of brake pads from the main store for a job, but the issue is not captured until the job card is closed on Wednesday. On Tuesday afternoon the counter counts the bin and finds two fewer sets than the system shows, and adjusts the record down. On Wednesday the job card is closed, the issue is captured, and the system deducts the same two sets again. The record is now short by exactly the amount the count "fixed".

The count was accurate. The sequence was wrong.

The same part in three places

A parts department rarely keeps a fast-moving part in one bin. There is the main store, a few on the workshop floor for quick jobs, a set in the service van for call-outs, and sometimes a returns shelf waiting for a supplier credit. If the count covers only the main store, and the system holds one total for the part, every unit in the workshop or the van looks like a shortage.

The fix is to know where each unit is supposed to be, and to count all locations for a part at the same time, or to record stock by location so that each location can be counted on its own.

Enter everything before you count

AccountingTools advises completing all outstanding inventory data entry before a physical count begins, including issues, returns and transfers between bins. For a parts department, the pre-count checklist looks like this:

1. Close or update open job cards so parts issued to jobs are recorded.
2. Capture any returns from technicians and any returns to suppliers.
3. Record moves between the store, the workshop floor and the vans.
4. Process deliveries received but not yet booked in.
5. Freeze movements in the bins being counted until the count is finished.

Only then does the count measure what it is supposed to measure.

Shelf to report, as well as report to shelf

Most counters work from a list: they read a part number from the report, walk to the bin and count. AccountingTools explains that counters should also trace items they see on the shelf back to the counting report, in case some items are not recorded in the system at all. In a parts store that is where the surprises live: a box of filters received under the wrong part number, a supersession stocked under the old code, a customer's part left behind after a job.

Count in both directions and the count finds the errors the report cannot show.

Every difference gets a reason

AccountingTools explains that errors found in cycle counts should lead to an adjustment of the inventory records and an investigation into the reason for each error, and describes investigating variances, and discussing them with the warehouse manager, as the most important cycle counting activity. In a dealership, that conversation is with the parts manager.

Typical reasons are worth listing on the count sheet so the counter can tick one: issue not recorded, transfer not recorded, wrong part number on receipt, superseded part, damaged and discarded, or unexplained. A pattern of "unexplained" in one bin is the start of a different conversation.

Counts per location in Achekam

With Achekam's Warehousing add-on, a business keeps stock locations such as warehouses, stores, bins and vans on the server, with the quantity on hand at each. A stock count sets a location's quantity to what was counted and records the difference as an adjustment. That suits the multi-bin problem: the van and the workshop floor can be counted as their own locations instead of being lumped into the main store.

One limit needs care. In Achekam, stock counts, wastage, transfers and opening quantities do not post to the general ledger; only till sales and till returns move the inventory account. A count adjustment therefore corrects the quantity at the location, but not the value of inventory in the books. Once the count's differences have been investigated, total their value at cost and post a manual journal for it yourself, between inventory and a stock adjustment expense account. Achekam refuses a journal that does not balance or that is dated in a closed month, so post it before the month is closed.

A counting routine for the parts department

• Count a few part groups each week, chosen so that every part is counted several times a year and fast movers more often.
• Before each count, clear the pre-count checklist.
• Count every location that holds the part, not just the main store.
• Count both ways: report to shelf and shelf to report.
• Record a reason for every difference, reviewed with the parts manager.
• Post the value of the agreed differences to the ledger at month end.

For setting up part numbers and barcodes so counts are easier to match, see parts stock, SKUs and barcodes; for parts that are scrapped rather than missing, read scrapped parts and redone work.

Cycle counting works when the record and the shelf are compared at the same moment. Get the timing right and the counts start fixing the records instead of chasing them.

Most used and new vehicles leave a dealership paid for by two people. The buyer puts down a deposit, often by transfer on the day the deal is signed. The rest comes later from a bank or finance house, straight into the dealer's account, once the finance agreement is approved and the paperwork is complete.

In the books that is one sale and two payments, received days or weeks apart, from different payers. And sometimes the second payment never comes, because the application is declined. This article sets out a way to record each step in Achekam so the vehicle, the deposit and the finance house's payout always tie up.

One vehicle invoice, two payers

Start from a simple rule: one vehicle, one invoice. The invoice carries the full selling price, and both payments are allocated against it.

Achekam lets you record customer payments against a single invoice or spread across several, and a part payment leaves the invoice part-paid. That is exactly the state a financed sale should be in between the deposit and the payout: issued, with the deposit applied and the balance waiting.

Check with each finance house which name it expects on the invoice and how it wants its reference quoted. Some want the buyer's name with the finance agreement number in the reference; whatever they ask for, use it every time, because that reference is how you will recognise their payment later.

Taking the deposit when pro-forma invoices are not offered

Many dealers like to send a pro-forma first. Achekam does not offer pro-forma invoices, so plan for that.

The cleanest route is to create the invoice when the deal is signed. You can prepare it as a draft, which you can still change or delete, and issue it when the deal is final. Issuing takes the next number in your sequence and posts debtors, sales and output VAT to the ledger. Then record the deposit as a part payment against it. If the buyer pays the deposit online, you can create a payment link for the issued invoice and e-mail it with the invoice.

Some dealers prefer not to issue the invoice until the vehicle is delivered. If yours does, agree with your accountant where the deposit sits in the meantime and how it is cleared once the invoice exists, because the timing of the invoice also decides when sales and VAT are recorded. That is a decision to make once and apply to every deal, not case by case.

Recording the finance house's payout

When the finance house pays, record its payment as a second receipt against the same invoice. The invoice moves from part-paid to paid, and your debtors balance for that buyer clears.

If the payout does not match the balance, stop before allocating it. Find out why from the finance house's settlement letter: a different agreed price, an extra the buyer added, or a fee. Allocate only what belongs to this invoice, and keep the settlement letter with the deal file. If more arrives than the invoice needs, the extra is held on the customer's account rather than lost.

When finance is declined

A declined application turns a sale back into a refund. Work through it in this order:

1. Issue a credit note from the vehicle invoice, in full. A credit note is always issued from the invoice it corrects, and it posts to the ledger.
2. The deposit now shows as credit held for the customer.
3. Decide with the buyer whether the deposit is refunded, kept for another vehicle, or partly kept under the deal's cancellation terms.
4. An administrator can refund or reverse the receipt in Achekam; make the actual payment back to the buyer from your banking.

For South African dealers, section 17 of the Consumer Protection Act deals with deposits on orders and what a supplier may keep when a consumer cancels; the Acts Online text of section 17 sets out when a reasonable deposit may be taken and what cancellation charge may be kept. Nigerian and Kenyan dealers should check their own consumer rules and the wording of their offer to purchase.

Refunding a deposit that was paid online

If the buyer paid the deposit through the invoice's pay link, Achekam does not send the refund through the payment gateway. The refund is made in the gateway's own dashboard, and a person then records it in Achekam. Do both on the same day, so the gateway's records and your receivables never disagree overnight. For the wider picture of refunds and cancellations in another industry that lives on deposits, see refunding cancelled travel bookings.

Matching both payments on the bank statement

Import the bank statement and match its lines. Achekam suggests matches and a person accepts each one; a line not yet in the books becomes a suggested journal that a person approves.

One trap: matching a bank receipt to a customer invoice does not record the payment on the invoice. The deposit and the payout must each also be recorded in receivables, or the invoice will still look unpaid while the bank looks right. A short checklist for each financed deal:

• deposit recorded against the invoice and matched on the bank statement;
• finance house payout recorded against the same invoice and matched;
• settlement letter and signed deal filed together;
• invoice showing paid, with nothing left on the buyer's account.

Payments by transfer at the service desk follow the same discipline, which bank transfers at the service counter covers. And if you also deal with conveyancers or other third parties who pay on a client's behalf, commission paid by the conveyancer shows the same two-payer pattern in property.

The next deal

Write your dealership's version of this routine on one page: when the invoice is issued, how deposits are taken, what reference each finance house uses, and who handles a declined application. Then test it on the next financed sale from deposit to payout.

It is late afternoon at the service desk. A customer has come to collect their car after a major service, the bill is larger than they expected, and they would rather pay by bank transfer than by card. They tap through their banking app, turn the phone round and show the service adviser a confirmation screen. The adviser has the keys in one hand. Do they hand them over?

Most workshops have been caught at least once by a transfer that never arrived: a payment that was scheduled rather than made, a confirmation from the wrong account, or simply a screenshot of somebody else's payment. Once the car has left, getting the money becomes a debt collection exercise.

This article sets out how Achekam's till handles a bank transfer at the counter, what it does and does not prove, and a release policy that protects the workshop without insulting honest customers.

A confirmation screen is not money in your account

Start from a simple principle: a transfer is paid when the money shows in the workshop's bank account, not when the customer's app says it has been sent. Depending on the banks involved, the two can be minutes or days apart.

The till does not change that principle. What it does is make sure the transfer is properly identified, so it can be found and checked.

How the till handles a bank transfer

The till is part of the Point of Sale add-on, under Commerce & POS. When the cashier chooses bank transfer as the payment method:

1. The till shows the business's bank details and a payment reference, so the customer pays into the right account and quotes something the workshop can trace.
2. The customer makes the transfer.
3. The cashier records the bank's reference for the payment. Until that reference is recorded, the till refuses the sale.

That last step is a useful discipline: no bank-transfer sale exists in the system without a reference that ties it to a specific payment. It is not, by itself, confirmation that the money has arrived. The cashier types in the reference the customer's bank provides; checking that the money actually reached the workshop's account is a separate step, covered below.

Paid in full, or not through the till

The server refuses any till sale that is not paid in full. The till is not the place for a customer who wants to pay half now and half at month end.

For those cases, use an invoice instead. An issued invoice can be paid through a pay page that shows the business's bank details and a payment reference, and a staff member marks the payment received once it shows on the bank statement. That route suits fleet customers and businesses that settle on account, and it keeps part payments visible on the invoice rather than forcing them through the counter.

Where the transfer posts in the ledger

Every till sale that reaches the server posts a balanced journal in the same step, with each payment method going to its own account. For a service bill paid by transfer:

Because transfers post to their own account, they can be checked separately from card and cash takings, which is exactly what the next step needs.

Checking it against the bank statement

Achekam imports bank statements as PDF, CSV, Excel, OFX, QIF, MT940 or CAMT.053, and checks each import so that the opening balance plus movements equals the closing balance. Bank lines are then matched by suggestion, and a person accepts each match. AccountingTools walks through the wider bank reconciliation process: comparing the business's cash records with the bank statement and adjusting the books.

For a workshop, a daily routine is enough:

• Import the day's statement the next morning.
• Accept matches for each counter transfer, using the bank reference the cashier recorded.
• Any transfer recorded at the till but not on the statement goes straight to the service manager. The customer is called the same day, while the conversation is still easy.

A release policy for the service desk

Agree a short policy, put it in writing, and apply it to everyone so nobody feels singled out:

1. Ask early. When the customer is told the car is ready, ask how they will pay. Suggest paying by transfer before they come in, quoting the reference.
2. Release on receipt. Keys go back when the transfer shows in the workshop's account, or when the payment is made by a method confirmed at the counter.
3. Know your exceptions. Decide which account customers, such as known fleets, may collect before payment shows, and who can authorise anyone else.
4. Record the reference every time. The till insists on it; make sure it is the bank's reference, not a note like "paid".
5. Follow up the same day. A missing transfer is a phone call today or a collections file next month.

For customers who would rather pay by card, the counter process is covered in recording card payments from the bank terminal. Kenyan workshops have a faster option still: an M-Pesa prompt when the customer collects.

The short version

The till makes sure every transfer has a reference and lands in the right account. Your policy decides when the keys go back. Together they let the service desk accept transfers without guessing, and give the accounts team a clean list to check the next morning.

Dealerships lose customers at two predictable moments. The first is when a customer's vehicle finance is about to end. They own the car outright, the monthly payment is disappearing, and they start wondering what to drive next. If the dealership that sold them the car is not in touch, a competitor will be. The second is when a service falls due. If nobody reminds them, they book with whichever workshop is nearest or cheapest, and the relationship quietly ends. Harvard Business Review's refresher on the value of keeping the right customers explains what the churn rate measures, why keeping customers costs less than winning new ones and which customers are worth keeping.

Both moments are known years or months in advance. The Automotive pack in Achekam's Industry CRM can remind the right people before each one. This article explains the two reminders, who receives them and how to act on them well.

Two reminders, one customer relationship

The first is an internal prompt for the dealership to start a conversation. The second goes to the customer and invites them back to the workshop. They work at different speeds, and they need different handling.

Six months and three months before finance ends

The pack reminds sales staff 180 days and again 90 days before a customer's finance ends.

At six months, the aim is a relaxed check-in, not a sales pitch. Has the vehicle served them well? Has their life changed, with a new job, a growing family or a longer commute? Would they like to know what their current vehicle might be worth as a trade-in? Many customers are not ready to decide, and that is fine; the conversation keeps the dealership in their mind.

At three months, the conversation can be more concrete for customers who showed interest: a test drive, a trade-in appraisal, an indication of what a new deal might look like. If they are not interested, record that and leave them alone until their next service.

Two rules keep these conversations healthy:

1. Be honest about what the dealership does. The pack applies for no finance; your finance and insurance staff and the banks do. Do not imply a pre-approved deal that does not exist.
2. Respect a no. A customer who says they are keeping their car has given you useful information, not an objection to overcome.

Any new sale that comes from the conversation starts as an enquiry in the pipeline described in vehicle sales from enquiry to delivery, and a trade-in follows the appraisal and approval process.

Fourteen days before a service is due

The pack can remind the customer 14 days before their next service is due. Two weeks is enough notice to book a slot that suits them, and close enough that they will act on it.

A good service reminder is short and practical:

• which vehicle it is about, by registration;
• that its next service is coming up;
• how to book, with the workshop's phone number and booking address;
• anything that makes the visit easier, such as courtesy transport or a waiting area.

When the customer books, the visit becomes a service job like any other, from check-in to signed authorisation; see workshop job cards signed electronically.

E-mail and in-app, nothing else

The Industry CRM's reminders go by e-mail and in-app only. There is no SMS and no WhatsApp.

For sales staff, that means the finance-end reminders arrive in their inbox and in Achekam, so the habit of checking both each morning matters. For customers, it means the service reminder depends on having a current e-mail address. Some customers rarely read their e-mail at all. Check and update the customer's e-mail address at every service visit, and keep your own way of reaching the customers who prefer a phone call.

The customer reminder stays off until you switch it on

Because the service reminder goes to customers, three rules apply to it:

• it stays off until a workspace administrator switches it on;
• it is sent at most once; and
• the number sent is limited by a daily cap.

Switching it on is a decision, not a default, which is right for any message that goes out in the dealership's name. Before switching it on, read the wording, check that service due dates are being recorded correctly on your customers' vehicles, and make sure the workshop can handle the bookings it generates.

The rule that a reminder is sent only once is worth remembering. If a customer ignores the reminder, the system will not chase them; a service adviser should, if your policy is to follow up.

Following up from the vehicle sale record

The finance-end reminder relates to a customer whose vehicle sale is on record. Open that record before calling, to see what they bought and whether a trade-in was part of the deal. Nothing makes a call feel more like a sales script than a salesperson who does not know which car the customer drives. After the call, note what was said: interested, not yet, or not at all. The next person to pick up the record, perhaps at the 90-day reminder or at the customer's next service visit, then starts from where the last conversation ended rather than from scratch.

Making the reminders count

Decide who handles finance-end reminders when the original salesperson has left, agree how service reminders will be worded, and switch on the customer reminder only once due dates are reliable. Handled with care, both reminders do the same job: they show the customer the dealership remembers them for reasons other than the next sale.

A logistics company with a fleet of delivery vans walks into the workshop and asks to open an account. Services, tyres, brake jobs, the occasional accident repair: steady work, every month, for years. The service manager is delighted. The person who keeps the books asks a quieter question: what happens if they stop paying after we have done three months of work?

Fleet accounts are among the most valuable customers a workshop or dealership can win, and among the most expensive to lose if they go bad. The workshop has already bought the parts and paid the technicians before the first invoice is even due. This article sets out how to check a fleet customer before the first job, and how to keep the account under control once it is open.

Why the check comes before the first job

ACCA identifies three key areas of managing accounts receivable: checking a customer's creditworthiness before granting credit, setting credit terms and monitoring receivables, and collecting cash from customers. The order matters. Once the work is done on credit, the only remaining tool is collection, and collection from a customer who cannot pay is slow and uncertain.

Investopedia describes credit control in the same spirit: deciding who qualifies for credit, assessing creditworthiness, and setting policies that balance sales growth with financial stability. A workshop that opens accounts on the strength of a handshake is choosing growth with no balance at all.

Where to look

ACCA lists ways to assess a customer's creditworthiness: bank references, trade references, credit rating or reference agencies, the customer's financial statements, financial media reports, and visits to the customer. For a fleet applicant, a practical pack looks like this:

• An application form with the registered company name and number, directors, physical address, and who is authorised to approve work and sign for vehicles.
• A bank reference, requested with the customer's written consent.
• Two or three trade references, ideally from suppliers that also extend credit on vehicles, such as a tyre supplier or a fuel card provider.
• A credit agency report from a bureau in your country.
• Recent financial statements, for larger fleets.
• A visit, to the depot where the vehicles are kept.

ACCA's article on accounts receivable management discusses each of these sources and how to weigh them.

What each source will and will not tell you

No single source settles the question, and ACCA is candid about their limits. A bank reference will stick to the facts and is rarely more than guarded. Financial statements may be out of date, or may have been manipulated. Trade references can be hand-picked by the applicant from the suppliers it pays first.

That is why the visit is worth the time. A depot with well-kept vehicles, a maintenance schedule on the wall and a fleet manager who knows the service history tells you more about how the business is run than a reference letter. A depot where vehicles are parked in the dust with flat tyres tells you something too.

Read the sources together. If the agency report shows recent judgments, the trade references are all very new suppliers, and the financial statements are two years old, the picture is consistent, and not in a good way.

Start low, and watch for the small-order trick

ACCA advises setting a credit limit for each new customer that grows only slowly as trust grows, with attempted breaches reported to the credit controller. It also warns of a common trick: a new customer places a small order and pays it promptly, then delays payment on a large one.

In a workshop the pattern is familiar. The first month is a few services, paid on the dot. The second month the customer books five vehicles in for major repairs and a set of tyres each. The invoice goes out, and the payment stops.

A sensible approach:

1. Start with a limit that covers routine servicing, not major repairs.
2. Require approval from the person who keeps the books before any single job above a set amount goes ahead on account.
3. Review the limit after a few months of on-time payment, not after the first one.
4. Treat a sudden jump in the size of jobs as a reason to look again, not a reason to celebrate.

Setting the limit, terms and hold in Achekam

Achekam's Wholesale add-on lets a business keep trade customers with credit limits, terms and a hold. Trade customers are created on the Wholesale screen, so the add-on is needed for this.

Where the workshop uses Achekam's till, a sale can be charged to a trade customer's account. Doing so writes a receivables invoice and checks the account's hold and credit limit. If either would be breached, the sale is stopped unless a supervisor or manager overrides it with a reason. That reason is the record ACCA's advice calls for: an attempted breach that someone had to justify.

Invoices raised outside the till work the usual way: a business creates customer invoices as drafts it can change or delete, and issuing one takes the next number in its sequence and posts it to the ledger as debtors, sales and output VAT. Default terms are 30 days; set the terms on the fleet account to whatever you agreed, and make sure the invoice says so.

Keeping the account healthy

The check at the start is only the first step. Each month, look at the fleet customer's balance against its limit and against its terms. Ask the fleet manager about any vehicle that has been in the workshop for a long time with a large repair pending; a customer that cannot authorise repairs may be a customer that cannot pay for them.

For trade counter accounts that work the same way, see selling on account at the trade counter, and for the policy that ties it together, read credit policy essentials.

A fleet account opened carefully is worth years of steady work. One opened in a hurry can cost more than the work was ever worth.

The box from the supplier contains the right part numbers in the right quantities. The delivery note is signed, the invoice matches the order, and the bill is paid. Three weeks later a technician opens one of the boxes and finds a clutch kit for the wrong variant, or a windscreen with a chip in the corner, or a set of brake discs that do not match the specification on the order. The supplier is now holding the money and has little reason to hurry.

Most workshops pay suppliers on a three-document check. For some parts, that is not enough. This article explains when to add a fourth check, a quality inspection, before paying, and how to record it so the payment waits until the parts have been passed.

From three documents to four

AccountingTools explains that a three-way match compares the supplier invoice, the purchase order and the receiving report to confirm that a payment should be made. It says the procedure ensures only authorised purchases are paid for, preventing losses due to fraud and carelessness. Matching the invoice to the receiving documentation, AccountingTools explains, checks that the goods were received, in the correct quantity and in good condition.

Four-way matching adds one more document. AccountingTools describes it as comparing the purchase order, the receiving report, the supplier invoice and an inspection or quality approval before payment is authorised, and notes that it is especially useful when product quality or specifications affect whether the business should pay. Its explanation of three-way matching covers both the three-way and four-way versions.

The difference is the depth of the look. At receiving, someone checks that the boxes are the right ones and not visibly damaged. At inspection, someone qualified checks that what is inside the boxes is what was ordered and fit to fit.

Parts where quality decides whether to pay

Not every delivery needs an inspection. Filters, wiper blades and globes rarely justify the effort. The fourth check earns its place where a defect is expensive, hard to spot at the receiving door, or likely to be found only once the part is on a customer's vehicle:

• Body panels and glass, where damage in transit is common and a chip or dent may be hidden by packaging.
• Major mechanical components, such as gearboxes, turbochargers or engine assemblies, especially reconditioned units.
• Safety-related parts, such as brake components, where a wrong specification is a risk to the customer.
• Parts bought from a new or unfamiliar supplier, until the supplier has a track record.
• High-value orders of any kind, where one bad item costs more than the inspection.

Write the list down, so the receiving clerk knows which deliveries go to the workshop foreman before the paperwork moves on.

Recording the delivery line by line

In Achekam, deliveries are recorded against a purchase order line by line, including part deliveries, and a goods-received record is kept. Use that to make the inspection count. For deliveries on your inspection list, record as received only the quantity that has passed inspection. Parts that are awaiting inspection, or that have failed it, are not yet received in the record.

Note one limit: in Achekam, goods received do not add stock. The goods-received record is a purchasing record, not a stock movement, so update your stock records separately in the way your business already does.

Holding the invoice until the difference is resolved

Here is where the matching does the work. A supplier invoice recorded against an order in Achekam is matched with what was ordered and what arrived. If the price or the quantity differ, the invoice is held until someone writes a resolution note.

So if the supplier invoices for four brake disc sets and only two passed inspection and were recorded as received, the quantity difference holds the invoice. Nobody pays for the two failed sets by accident, and the resolution note becomes the record of what was agreed with the supplier.

Getting a revised invoice or a credit note

AccountingTools says that when a three-way match finds a problem, accounts payable staff contact the supplier, which may lead to a revised invoice or a credit memo from the supplier. For rejected parts the usual outcomes are:

1. Replacement. The supplier sends replacement parts, which are inspected and received in turn, and the original invoice is paid once everything is received.
2. Credit. The supplier issues a credit note for the rejected parts, and the invoice is paid net of the credit.
3. Revised invoice. The supplier cancels the original and invoices only for what was accepted.

Whichever it is, the resolution note on the held invoice should say which route was agreed, who agreed it and when. That note is what someone checking the payment months later will need.

Filing inspection photos and notes

An inspection that leaves no evidence is hard to defend when the supplier disputes the rejection. Take photos of the damage or the wrong part number, alongside the packaging and the delivery note, and write a short inspection note: what was checked, by whom, what was found.

Achekam's Document Centre is a folder-based store where a business uploads files or whole folders, previews, downloads, renames, moves, tags, archives and searches them, and a new version keeps the earlier ones. Keep a folder per purchase order, or tag files with the order number, so the photos and the inspection note sit with the order they belong to. Uploads go in batches of up to 25 files.

A short routine for the parts department

• The order states the specification, not just the part number.
• Receiving checks the boxes, counts them and signs.
• Parts on the inspection list go to the named inspector before anything is recorded as received.
• Only passed parts are recorded as received.
• Rejects are photographed, noted and returned or held for collection.
• Held invoices are resolved with a note that says what the supplier agreed.

For deciding which purchases need two, three or four checks, see two-way or three-way match, and for keeping part numbers clean, read parts stock, SKUs and barcodes.

An inspection costs a little time at the receiving door. Paying for a part you then have to fight to return costs a great deal more.

A carton of brake discs costs what the overseas supplier charges, and then some. By the time it is on your shelf you have paid for sea or air freight, insurance, customs duty, the clearing agent, port charges and the truck from the port. The next carton of the same discs, on the next ship, will carry a different freight bill and perhaps a different exchange rate.

For a parts importer, the real cost of a part is its landed cost, and it moves. This article explains what goes into landed cost, how Achekam uses the cost price you give each item, and how to keep your margins honest when shipments do not cost the same.

What goes into landed cost

Landed cost is everything you spend to get a part into your store and ready to sell. A typical build-up:

• the supplier's price for the goods;
• freight to your country, and insurance in transit;
• customs duty and other import charges that you cannot recover;
• the clearing and forwarding agent's fees, and port and storage charges;
• transport from the port or airport to your store.

Which of these you carry depends on the trade term in your purchase contract. The International Chamber of Commerce explains the eleven Incoterms rules that set who pays for and carries the risk of the goods at each stage of delivery, and reading the term on your supplier's invoice is the first step in knowing what to add. Ask your accountant which taxes paid at the border belong in cost and which you claim back.

Then spread the shipment's extra costs over the parts in it. Most importers spread by value; some spread heavy items by weight. Pick one method and keep it.

One cost price per item, typed when it is created

Parts are created in the Item Master in the Accounting menu, with a SKU, name, category, selling price, cost price, opening quantity and VAT treatment. The Item Master needs the Point of Sale, Warehousing or Wholesale add-on.

Here is the limit to plan around: no screen lets you change a product's price, cost or VAT treatment after you create it, or deactivate it. The cost price you type on day one is the cost price the item keeps. So the landed cost you enter deserves care. Work it out from a real shipment, check it against your costing sheet, and only then create the item.

How the cost drives cost of sales at the till

When a part is sold at the till, the sale posts a balanced journal that includes cost of sales against inventory at the product's cost price. Achekam uses that single typed cost: there is no FIFO or weighted-average costing that would blend an older, cheaper shipment with a newer, dearer one.

In practice that means:

• if your typed cost is lower than the real landed cost of the parts now on the shelf, your margin will look better than it is;
• if it is higher, your margin will look worse;
• either way, the inventory account drifts from what the stock is really worth.

When the next shipment costs more

You have two honest options.

Keep one standard cost and correct the difference. Leave the item's cost as it is and track each shipment's real landed cost on a costing sheet. At month end, your accountant works out the difference on the parts actually sold and posts a manual journal to correct cost of sales. Achekam refuses an unbalanced journal or one dated in a closed month, and a posted journal is corrected only by a reversal, so the adjustment leaves a clear trail.

Create a new item for a shipment with a very different cost. This keeps cost of sales right at the till, but you then have two items for one part. Counter staff must pick the right one, and because a barcode scan finds a product only when the scanned code matches its SKU, the new item needs its own SKU. Use this sparingly, for big and lasting price changes, not for every container.

Recording freight and duty bills

The freight forwarder, the clearing agent and the transport company each send a bill. Record each one as a supplier bill, line by line with VAT. A bill without a purchase order waits for approval before it posts, and you can pay it in full or in parts from a chosen bank account.

Remember that only till sales and till returns move the inventory account; opening quantities and stock counts do not post to the general ledger. So the value of the parts you import reaches the books through the bills you post. Agree with your accountant which accounts those bills go to, so that inventory and cost of sales are not overstated twice.

A costing sheet to keep beside the item list

Keep one sheet per shipment with these columns:

1. Supplier invoice number and date, and the exchange rate used.
2. Each part's SKU, quantity and supplier price.
3. The freight, insurance, duty, clearing and transport bills, with their supplier bill numbers in Achekam.
4. The method used to spread those costs, and the resulting landed cost per part.
5. The cost price typed in the Item Master, and the difference.

That last column is the one your accountant needs at month end. For how parts are set up and scanned at the counter, see parts stock, SKUs and barcodes; for reading the margin those costs produce, see parts margin versus labour income.

Before the next container lands

Build the costing sheet for the shipment that is on the water now, and decide in advance whether you will correct differences by journal or by new item. A dealer who also holds vehicles faces the same single-cost limit; keeping used vehicles in stock covers that case.

After an accident, the repair is authorised by the insurer, but the car belongs to someone else. The owner wants it back. The insurer's assessor approved a quote, and the insurer will pay once the claim is processed. The owner owes the excess, and perhaps the cost of extras the policy does not cover. A warranty or service-plan repair works the same way: the plan provider pays most of it, the owner pays what the plan excludes.

One repair, two debtors, paying at different speeds. A panel shop that bills it as one invoice ends up chasing an amount that nobody owes in full. This article shows how to split the bill, release the vehicle cleanly and follow up insurers until they pay.

Who owes what on an insured or warranty repair

Settle the split before the vehicle leaves:

Get the insurer's authorisation in writing, with the claim number and the authorised amount, and keep it with the job. If the assessor changes the authorised amount during the repair, file the revised authorisation as well.

In South Africa, how insurers allocate repair work and appoint motor-body repairers is the subject of the Competition Commission's guidelines for the automotive aftermarket, which also cover in-warranty servicing and repairs by independent workshops. It is worth reading if you depend on insurer work.

Two invoices: the insurer's share and the owner's excess

Raise two customer invoices for the job:

1. To the insurer, for the authorised repair less the excess, quoting the claim number, the owner's name and the vehicle's registration.
2. To the owner, for the excess and any agreed extras.

Create each one as a draft first, check it against the authorisation, and then issue it. Issuing takes the next number in your sequence and posts debtors, sales and output VAT. An issued invoice can be downloaded as a PDF on your letterhead and e-mailed straight from the invoice, with or without a pay link, and a failed send is reported as not sent, so you know whether the insurer's claims inbox actually received it.

How VAT applies to the excess and to the insurer's share is a question for your accountant; settle it once and apply it to every insured job.

The insurer's tax number on its invoice

Insurers usually insist that their tax number appears on your invoice. Enter it on the insurer's customer record. On documents, Achekam prints a customer's tax number as a VAT number only when it looks like a South African VAT number; otherwise it prints as a tax number. A Nigerian or Kenyan insurer's number will therefore show as a tax number, which is what you want.

Releasing the vehicle once the excess is paid

Make payment of the excess the condition for handing over the keys. When the owner pays, record the payment against their invoice. If they pay only part, the invoice stays part-paid and the balance is plain to see.

Most owners pay by card or transfer at collection. For transfers at the desk, bank transfers at the service counter explains how to confirm the money has arrived before releasing the car.

Following up insurers and plan providers by statement

Insurers pay in batches, and one remittance often covers many claims. Two tools help:

• The age analysis. Receivables are aged into 0-30, 31-60, 61-90, 91-120 and over 120 days, with overdue totals. Read it at each month end with the insurers in mind, and the claims that are slipping stand out.
• The statement of account. The server produces a customer statement as a PDF that can be e-mailed, and the screen says whether it was sent. Send each insurer's claims department a statement every month; it lists every open claim invoice in one place.

When a remittance arrives, allocate it across the insurer's invoices claim by claim, using the claim numbers on their advice. If documents for a claim are still missing, sending claim documents through a secure link shows how brokers move them safely.

When an insurer pays less than the invoice

Short payments happen: a part is priced lower by the assessor, labour hours are cut, or betterment is applied late. Work through it like this:

1. Record what was paid. The invoice stays part-paid.
2. Ask the insurer for the reason in writing.
3. If you accept the reduction, issue a credit note from that invoice for the lines or amount conceded. A credit note is always issued from the invoice it corrects.
4. If the shortfall is the owner's responsibility under the policy, invoice the owner for it separately.
5. If it will not be recovered from anyone, an unpaid debt can be written off once a partner approves.

Keep the reason with the job, because the next claim from the same insurer will likely meet the same assessor's rule.

Making it routine

Set up each insurer you work with as a customer with its tax number and claims e-mail address, and agree inside the workshop who raises the two invoices on every insured job. Parts used on the repair raise a separate stock question, covered in parts on workshop invoices.

In a Kenyan workshop, the question at collection is almost always the same: "Can I pay with M-Pesa?" The usual answer is to read out the paybill number and the account number, wait while the customer types them, and hope there is no slip of the thumb. A wrong digit means a payment the workshop cannot find, a customer who insists they have paid, and a car that either leaves unpaid or sits in the yard while everyone argues.

There is a better way. Instead of asking the customer to type anything, the workshop sends a payment prompt straight to the customer's phone, for the exact job invoice. The customer enters their PIN, and the payment is confirmed before anyone hands over the keys. This article explains how that works in Achekam and the details that catch workshops out.

Two places to send a prompt from

Achekam can send an M-Pesa prompt, an STK push, from two places, and a workshop may use both:

This article concentrates on the invoice route, because that is how most service and repair work is billed.

Sending the prompt for the job invoice

When the customer arrives, the service adviser opens the job invoice and sends an M-Pesa payment prompt to the customer's phone number, to the workshop's paybill or Buy Goods till. The prompt goes through the workshop's own Daraja app with Safaricom.

The prompt appears on the customer's phone and they enter their PIN. Nothing counts yet. Achekam records the payment only after it has been confirmed with Safaricom.

Once confirmed, the payment is recorded as a receipt against the invoice. In the ledger, it debits the M-Pesa clearing account and credits trade receivables, and the invoice shows as paid, or part-paid if the amount did not cover it. The amount is checked against what was asked for, and a repeated notification never pays the same invoice twice.

At the counter, step by step

1. Confirm the job invoice is issued and the customer agrees the amount.
2. Ask which phone number will pay; it need not be the customer's own, for example when an employer or relative is paying.
3. Send the prompt and tell the customer it is on its way.
4. Wait for Achekam to show the payment as confirmed.
5. Hand over the keys and the invoice, now marked paid.

Whole shillings only: the cents stay due

An invoice prompt asks for whole shillings only. If the job invoice has cents on it, those cents stay due on the invoice after the M-Pesa payment.

That small detail creates irritating balances. A customer pays the prompt, drives away, and the invoice shows a few cents outstanding for ever. The simplest fix is to price labour and parts so that invoices come to whole shillings. If that is not practical, agree with your accountant how small leftover balances should be cleared, and do it consistently.

The till works differently. On a shilling till, the amount is rounded to whole shillings by the business's rounding rule. By default Achekam rounds an M-Pesa amount up to the whole shilling; the rule can be set to round down or to the nearest shilling, and the difference is recorded on the sale.

Confirmed with Safaricom before it counts

The rule for the service desk is simple: the keys go back when Achekam shows the payment as confirmed, not when the customer says "it has gone through".

Usually that takes moments. Occasionally Safaricom's notification is delayed or never arrives. Achekam still picks those payments up, because the server asks M-Pesa about open payments on a schedule and while the pay page is open. If a customer insists they have paid and nothing shows, wait a little before sending another prompt; the payment may still appear.

One prompt a minute per phone

The same phone can be prompted once a minute. If the customer dismisses the first prompt, or their phone was locked, the adviser must wait before trying again. Telling the customer that up front saves frustration at the counter.

Before the first prompt: Go-Live

Prompts need a working connection to Safaricom in production. To take M-Pesa for real, the workshop completes Safaricom's Go-Live for its short code, then enters its own production short code, passkey and Daraja keys in Achekam. Safaricom e-mails the production passkey after Go-Live. Until that is done, prompts cannot reach customers' phones for real payments. Safaricom's Daraja documentation for M-PESA Express explains how the STK push works, from the request and callback to sandbox testing, and sets out the go-live steps for a paybill or till.

Refunds and payouts

Two follow-up tasks happen outside the prompt itself:

• Refunds. Achekam does not refund or reverse M-Pesa payments. If a customer is owed money back, the workshop refunds it in its M-Pesa org portal and records the refund in Achekam.
• Payouts. When M-Pesa money moves from the clearing account to the bank, the payout is recorded by hand against the M-Pesa clearing account with its fees, so the clearing account empties as it should.

Setting up the service desk

Make sure every customer record has the right M-Pesa number, price jobs in whole shillings where you can, and agree the release rule with the service advisers. Customers who prefer to pay by card or bank transfer can still do so; see recording card payments from the bank terminal and bank transfers at the service counter.

A customer in Lagos drops off a car for a gearbox repair and is told it will be ready on Friday. On Thursday the workshop discovers the part has to come from abroad. Nobody calls. On Friday the customer arrives, waits an hour, and is told it could be another two weeks. By the time the car is ready, the relationship is gone, and the customer is quoting the back of the job card at the service adviser: "the workshop is not liable for any delay or damage however caused."

Delays happen in every workshop, especially when parts are imported. What turns a delay into a complaint is usually silence, a surprise on the bill, or small print that tries to make the customer carry every risk. Nigeria's Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Act speaks to all three. This article explains what the FCCPC says the Act expects, and how to set up job cards, quotations and invoices that hold up.

Section 130: on time, and prompt notice when it is not

The FCCPC states that section 130 of the FCCPA requires businesses to deliver products and services in a timely manner and, where delay is unavoidable, to notify and update consumers promptly. The FCCPC's page on consumer rights and responsibilities summarises this section alongside the other consumer rights in the Act.

For a workshop, the second half of that sentence is where most problems arise. A delay that could not be avoided is not, in itself, the issue. Failing to tell the customer is. A practical routine:

• Give a realistic completion date at check-in, and write it on the job card.
• The moment a delay becomes likely, such as a part on back order or a second fault found during strip-down, contact the customer.
• Say what has caused the delay, what the new expected date is, and what the customer's options are.
• Update the customer again if the new date slips, rather than waiting for them to call.
• Record each contact on the job file: when, how and what was said.

That record is the workshop's evidence that it kept the customer informed.

Terms that will not hold

Workshop paperwork in Nigeria often carries broad disclaimers, copied from old forms. The FCCPC states that section 129 of the FCCPA makes void and of no effect any notice or agreement that purports to limit, exclude or waive a business's liability for defective performance, fraud, negligence or misrepresentation, or to waive implied obligations.

Read your job card and quotation with that in mind. Wording such as "the workshop accepts no responsibility for loss or damage to vehicles however caused", or "all work is accepted without warranty of any kind", tries to do exactly what the FCCPC describes section 129 as making void. A notice on the wall of the reception area is treated no differently.

Removing those clauses does not leave the workshop exposed to everything. It can still describe, honestly and specifically, what it is and is not doing: for example, that a diagnostic is limited to the fault the customer reported, or that a customer-supplied part is fitted at the customer's request. What it cannot do is use small print to escape responsibility for its own defective work or negligence.

Plain language on the job card and quotation

The FCCPC states that section 114 of the FCCPA requires businesses to provide information about their products and services in plain language that consumers can easily understand. A job card full of abbreviations and a quotation that lists part codes without descriptions fall short of that.

A plain-language job card names the customer and vehicle, describes the complaint in the customer's own words, lists the work authorised, gives the expected completion date, and states how the customer will be told about extra work or delay.

Prices up front, and the same price at payment

The FCCPC states that section 115 of the FCCPA requires businesses to fully disclose material facts, including prices, and that displayed prices must be equivalent to the point-of-payment or cash-out price. For a workshop that means the price quoted and agreed for the work, labour and parts, should be the price the customer meets at the cashier. If extra work is needed, agree its price with the customer before doing it, so that the final bill contains no surprises.

Itemised written records

The FCCPC states that section 118 of the FCCPA requires businesses, except where impracticable, to provide written records of transactions on a consumer's request, itemising the goods or services sold and any applicable taxes. A workshop invoice that reads only "repairs as discussed" with a single amount does not do that. List labour and each part separately, with the tax shown.

Signed job card terms and the invoice in Achekam

Achekam does not write your job card terms; that is for the workshop, ideally with legal advice. It does help you collect agreement to them and produce the itemised record.

Any document, such as the job card terms or a repair quotation prepared as a PDF or composed from text blocks, can be sent for electronic signature with signature and initials fields placed on it, with an expiry and reminders. The signed PDF and a completion certificate are filed back into Documents. That gives the workshop evidence of what the customer agreed to, including the expected date and how changes would be handled.

For the bill itself, a business creates customer invoices as drafts it can change or delete, and issuing one takes the next number in its sequence and posts it to the ledger as debtors, sales and output VAT. The issued invoice can be downloaded as a PDF on the business's letterhead and e-mailed from the invoice, and a failed send is reported as not sent. Put labour and parts on separate lines so the PDF is the itemised record the FCCPC describes.

A checklist for the service desk

• Expected completion date written on the job card.
• No clause that tries to exclude liability for negligence or defective work.
• Plain descriptions of work and parts, not just codes.
• Every price agreed before the work, and extra work agreed before it starts.
• Delays notified promptly, with each contact recorded.
• An itemised invoice with taxes shown.

For selling vehicles rather than repairing them, see selling used and reconditioned cars in Nigeria; for how parts appear on the bill, read parts on workshop invoices.

A customer who is told about a delay before they have to ask is usually a customer who comes back.

Most cars sold on Nigerian lots have had a life before they arrived. Some are foreign-used imports, the familiar tokunbo; some are Nigerian-used trade-ins; some have had an engine or gearbox reconditioned before sale. Buyers know this in general. What causes disputes is the particular car: the buyer who thought the vehicle was foreign-used and later finds it was locally used for years, or who learns after purchase that the engine was rebuilt.

The Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Act puts the duty to be clear on the seller. This article explains what the FCCPC says the Act requires when a dealer sells used, second-hand or reconditioned vehicles, why "sold as is" does not settle the matter, and what the sale invoice and the deal file should record.

Section 117: say it clearly

The FCCPC states that section 117 of the FCCPA obliges businesses to inform consumers conspicuously and adequately when products are used, second-hand or reconditioned. The FCCPC's summary of consumer rights and responsibilities lists this duty with the other rights the Act gives consumers.

Two words carry the weight. Conspicuously means the buyer should not have to hunt for it: not a line buried in the terms on the back of the offer form, but a statement the buyer sees before agreeing. Adequately means saying enough for the buyer to understand what they are buying. "Used vehicle" says less than "foreign-used, imported this year, engine reconditioned by the dealership before sale".

A practical standard for every vehicle on the lot:

• Whether it is new, foreign-used, Nigerian-used or reconditioned.
• What reconditioning or major repair was done, and by whom.
• The mileage as shown, and whether the dealer has reason to doubt it.
• Known defects the dealer has not repaired.

Put this on the vehicle's display card, on the offer to purchase and on the invoice, so it is consistent wherever the buyer looks.

Plain language, and the price on display is the price

The FCCPC also describes section 114, which calls for information about goods and services to be given in plain language a consumer can readily follow. Trade jargon on the windscreen card, or abbreviations on the offer form, defeat the purpose of disclosure.

Under section 115, as the FCCPC summarises it, material facts such as the price must be fully disclosed, and the price displayed must match the price charged at the point of payment. If the windscreen shows one naira figure, the buyer should not meet a higher one at the cashier because of fees nobody mentioned. If documentation, registration or delivery charges apply, show them up front.

Written records on request

Section 118, in the FCCPC's summary, entitles a consumer who asks to a written record of the transaction, unless that is impracticable, itemising what was sold and any taxes that apply. For a vehicle sale, the invoice is the natural written record. It should describe the vehicle fully and itemise anything sold with it, such as accessories or a service, rather than lumping everything into one figure.

Why "sold as is" cannot waive everything

Many lots still use "sold as is, no returns" on their paperwork. According to the FCCPC, section 129 of the FCCPA renders void any notice or agreement that tries to limit, exclude or waive a seller's liability for fraud, misrepresentation, negligence or defective performance, or to waive the obligations the law implies.

That does not stop a dealer telling a buyer the truth about a car's condition. Disclosing a known defect is exactly what section 117 asks for. What a dealer cannot do, on the FCCPC's account of section 129, is rely on blanket wording to escape liability for misrepresentation, such as describing a locally used car as foreign-used, or for fraud. Honest, specific disclosure protects the dealer far better than a blanket disclaimer.

Returns in good condition within a reasonable time

The FCCPC explains that section 122 lets consumers return goods, apart from in limited circumstances, provided the goods are still in good condition and come back within a reasonable time. For a dealer, that is a reason to record the vehicle's condition at handover, with the buyer's acknowledgement, so that any later question about whether a returned car is in good condition can be answered from evidence rather than memory. Take legal advice on how the limited circumstances apply to your sales.

The sale invoice in Achekam

A dealer creates customer invoices in Achekam as drafts it can change or delete. Issuing one takes the next number in its sequence and posts it to the ledger as debtors, sales and output VAT. The issued invoice can be downloaded as a PDF on the dealer's letterhead and e-mailed from the invoice, with or without a pay link, and a failed send is reported as not sent.

Use the invoice to carry the disclosure:

For a Nigerian business, Achekam lets you pick a tax code on each invoice line: standard, zero-rated, exempt, out of scope or reverse charge. Only standard lines carry VAT, at the approved rate for the country. This applies once the Nigerian country pack is activated in Settings. Which code applies to a vehicle or an accessory is a tax question for your adviser; the system applies the code you choose.

The deal file

Keep, for each vehicle sold: the purchase or import documents, any reconditioning invoices, the display card, the signed offer to purchase, the condition report at handover, and the issued invoice. If a buyer later says they were not told, that file is the dealer's answer.

For keeping each vehicle visible while it is on the lot, see used vehicles in stock; for taking payment, read collecting naira payments; and for the tax details on the invoice itself, see your tax ID on invoices.

The dealers who have the fewest disputes are rarely the ones with the cleanest cars. They are the ones whose buyers knew exactly what they were getting.

In a three-person workshop, the person who takes the customer's money is often the person who records it, banks it and follows up the accounts that have not paid. The owner knows that is not ideal. Every guide to internal control says the duties should be split. But there is nobody to split them with: the second person is a technician under a bonnet, and the third is the owner, who is out quoting a fleet job.

This is not a failure of the business. It is a fact of its size. The answer is not to pretend the duties are split, but to replace the missing separation with checks the owner does personally, on a fixed timetable, that would expose a problem if one existed. This article sets out what those checks are.

Why full separation is hard in a small workshop

AccountingTools notes that segregation of duties is harder to achieve in a smaller organisation with too few people, and that spreading tasks across too many people can slow processing. In a small workshop, insisting that a second person approve every receipt would stop the counter working.

So the owner has to accept some concentration of duties, and decide how to compensate for it.

Prevent where you can, detect where you cannot

Investopedia explains that internal controls are broadly divided into preventative controls, which aim to stop errors or fraud happening, and detective controls, which are backup procedures to catch items missed by the first line of defence. Its explanation of internal controls walks through both kinds with examples.

A large dealership leans on prevention: one person cannot both raise and approve a payment. A small workshop cannot afford much prevention of that kind, so detection has to carry more of the weight. The owner's review is the detective control. It works because the person doing it is the one person in the business with no reason to hide anything, and because the people doing the daily work know it will happen.

Investopedia also cautions that internal controls provide only reasonable assurance, and can be undermined by management override and by collusion between employees. In a very small business the owner is the management, which is one more reason for the owner to take the review seriously rather than delegate it.

The owner's monthly review

Investopedia identifies reconciliation, comparing one set of data with another, as the most important detective control, with corrective action taken when material differences are found. Almost every check below is a reconciliation of some kind.

1. The bank reconciliation. In Achekam, bank lines are matched by suggestion and a person accepts each match, a bank line not yet in the books becomes a suggested journal that a person approves, and a reconciliation completes only when there is no difference left or every leftover line is explained. Read the explanations. A leftover line explained as "timing" should clear next month; one that is still there three months later needs a better answer.

2. The till reports against the bank. A live X report of an open till and a Z report frozen at cash-up can both be opened as PDFs. Pick a few days at random each month, take the Z reports, and trace the cash and card totals into the bank deposits and card settlements. A day where cash recorded at the till never reached the bank is the single most useful thing this check can find.

3. The general ledger. The general ledger lists every posted line, and the trial balance shows each account for all time, for a period or at a date, and says whether debits equal credits. Scan the month's journals for anything unusual: manual journals to sales or to bad debts, round amounts, entries late in the month to accounts that rarely move.

4. Payments out. Look at every supplier payment above a level you choose and check that the supplier is one you recognise, for parts or services you remember receiving.

Reading the aged debtors

Achekam ages receivables into 0-30, 31-60, 61-90, 91-120 and over 120 days, with overdue totals. For an owner, this report is not only a collections tool. It is a fraud check.

Look for invoices that should have been paid. A fleet customer that always pays promptly but has one invoice sitting in the 61-90 column; a cash customer showing a balance; a customer that tells you they paid when you phone them. Any of these can be innocent. Each can also be the trace of a payment received and not recorded against the invoice. Phone the customer yourself when something looks odd; it is the quickest way to find out.

Signs that a control has been overridden

Some patterns deserve a closer look, whoever is involved:

• Bank reconciliations that are always done, but always late.
• A staff member who never takes leave and will not let anyone else do the cash-up.
• Credit notes or refunds just after month end, reversing sales that were in the previous month.
• Customers with balances that never seem to age, because payments are applied to the oldest invoice from someone else's money.
• Explanations on reconciliations that are vague and repeated month after month.

None of these proves anything. Together, they tell the owner where to look next.

Making it a habit

The review works only if it happens every month, at about the same time, and if the staff know it happens. Write it down as a short checklist, initial and date each item as you go, and keep the signed checklist with the month's records. If something needs follow-up, write that down too, and check it the following month.

For a broader look at splitting duties in a small business, see segregation of duties and controls for a one-person practice. For the card side of the till check, read recording card payments from the bank terminal.

A small workshop will never have the controls of a large dealership. It can have an owner who looks, regularly and properly, and that is worth a great deal.

A parts department spends a large share of a dealership's or workshop's money, often through one or two people who know the suppliers well. That knowledge is valuable. It is also exactly what makes a kickback scheme possible: a buyer steers orders to a supplier, and the supplier quietly pays the buyer for the favour.

Kickbacks are hard to see because nothing looks wrong on any single invoice. The parts arrive, the prices are within reason, the supplier is a familiar name. The cost shows up elsewhere, in margins that slowly erode, comebacks that rise, and suppliers who never seem to lose. This article describes the signs, and the purchasing records that make a scheme harder to run.

How the bribe gets paid back

ACCA identifies three types of corruption fraud: conflicts of interest, bribery and extortion. ACCA describes bribery as offering money or something else of value to influence a situation. A supplier kickback to a parts buyer is bribery in that sense.

The supplier is not giving money away. It recovers the kickback from the business. The OECD, writing about corruption in public procurement, states that those paying bribes seek to recover their money by inflating prices, billing for work not performed, failing to meet contract standards, reducing quality or using inferior materials. The OECD's brochure on preventing corruption in public procurement describes these risks at each stage of buying, and the same mechanics apply to a private parts department.

In a workshop, that translates into a few recognisable patterns:

• Inflated prices. One supplier's prices drift above the market, a little at a time, and nobody else is asked to quote.
• Short deliveries. Invoices for quantities that never quite arrive, or for parts that were never fitted.
• Lower quality. Pattern parts invoiced at original-part prices, or parts that fail early and come back as comebacks.

Conflicts of interest and the missing second check

The OECD lists conflict of interest in bid evaluation, arising from familiarity with bidders, gifts or promises of future employment, as a contract-award risk, together with the absence of an effective "four eyes" principle, where a second person checks the decision.

In a parts department, the warning signs are human as well as financial:

• The buyer is unusually close to one supplier's representative, and that supplier's gifts or hospitality are never declared.
• The buyer resists anyone else dealing with that supplier, or covering for them on leave.
• The same person chooses the supplier, places the order and signs for the delivery.
• A relative or former colleague of the buyer works for, or owns, the supplier.

The OECD also lists technical specifications tailored for a specific company, and selection criteria that are not objectively defined in advance, as integrity risks. In parts buying, that looks like orders specifying a brand or part number only one supplier can provide, when equivalent parts are available elsewhere.

Reading the quotations

The quotations behind an order are where steering shows. Ask these questions of a sample of recent orders:

1. Were competing quotations obtained at all?
2. Who was asked to quote, and were they genuine competitors?
3. Did the same supplier win nearly every time?
4. Do the losing quotes look real, or do they seem prepared to lose?
5. Did the winning supplier's price change after it was chosen?

A pattern of the same supplier winning, from a small circle of the same competitors, is worth a closer look even if every individual decision has an explanation.

The written reason when the cheapest quote loses

There are good reasons not to buy the cheapest part: quality, availability, warranty support. But each of those reasons should be stated when the decision is made, not invented afterwards.

In Achekam, supplier quotations are captured against a requisition and one is selected. Choosing a quotation that is not the cheapest needs a written reason, and that reason is kept. A quotation can also be disqualified with a reason. Over time, those reasons become a record that can be reviewed: if the same buyer keeps choosing the same more expensive supplier for "better availability", the owner can test whether availability was actually better.

A purchase order is then raised from the selected quotation of an approved requisition. The person who raised the order cannot approve it, and an approved order can be cancelled only with a reason. That builds a second pair of eyes into each order, which is the "four eyes" check the OECD describes.

What the integrity review flags

Achekam offers a procurement integrity review, sold as its own add-on. It raises questions about warning patterns such as competing quotations that share contact or bank details, or a supplier paid into an employee's bank account. Those are classic signs that the "competition" was not real, or that the supplier and the employee are closer than they should be.

The review raises questions; it does not decide that anyone is guilty. Every flag needs a person to look at it and either explain it or escalate it. One limit to know: its check for purchases split to stay under an approval threshold does nothing until a threshold is set, and the app cannot set one, so that particular test does not run today.

What the owner can do this month

• Pick a supplier that receives a large share of parts spend, and get fresh quotes for a sample of its regular parts.
• Read the written reasons on recent non-cheapest selections.
• Check that the person who raises orders is not also approving them.
• Compare comeback rates on parts from different suppliers.
• Ask staff to declare gifts and hospitality from suppliers, and keep the register.

For a wider view of fraud by employees, see occupational fraud schemes; for checking the cost of parts bought from abroad, read costing imported parts.

A parts buyer who knows every quotation will be read is a parts buyer with very little room to steer.

Ask a workshop owner whether the business makes its money on parts or on labour and you often get a shrug. Both arrive on the same job, both are paid for at the same counter, and at month end there is one sales figure. Yet the two behave very differently. Labour is time you already pay for; parts are stock you bought, carried and sometimes wrote off.

You can see the two apart in Achekam's monthly figures, but only if parts and labour reach the ledger by different roads. This article explains which road each one takes, how to read the result, and what makes a parts margin look better than it really is.

Where till sales post

Every sale rung up at the till that reaches the server posts a balanced journal in the same step. It includes:

• the payment, to the account for its method (cash, card, EFT, M-Pesa and so on);
• the sale itself, to revenue account 4000;
• the output VAT, to account 2150;
• cost of sales, to accounts 5000 and 5100, against inventory in account 1300, at the product's cost price.

So a part sold at the till brings its own cost with it. The income statement shows what you charged and what the part cost, in the same month, from the same sale.

Where invoices post

Customer invoices take a different road. All invoice revenue posts to one account, Professional Services Revenue (4100), whatever the line says, and a line cannot name another sales account. Invoice lines are typed in rather than picked from your product list, so an invoice neither moves stock nor posts cost of sales.

For a workshop that is useful, as long as you use it on purpose. If labour goes on invoices and parts go through the till, account 4100 becomes your labour income and account 4000 becomes your parts income, with the parts' cost sitting right underneath it.

Reading parts margin from the income statement

Management accounts in Achekam show an income statement for a period you choose, beside the period before, and a balance sheet at period end, added up from your own journals. Both export as PDF or CSV.

A worked example in words. Open the income statement for last month:

1. Take revenue in account 4000: that is what customers paid for parts at the till, before VAT.
2. Take cost of sales in accounts 5000 and 5100: that is what those same parts cost you, at the cost prices on the items.
3. The difference is your parts gross margin. Divide it by the parts revenue to get the margin as a share of sales.
4. Account 4100 is labour (and anything else you invoiced). It has no cost of sales beside it, because the cost of labour sits in wages.

Compare the result with the month before, which the statement already shows beside it. If you want a fuller explanation of the measure itself, Investopedia's guide to gross margin explains what share of sales revenue a business keeps after the direct costs of the goods it sells, and how to calculate it.

You can also set a budget per account and period and compare it with actual figures, so a target parts margin can sit next to the real one every month.

Why the margin depends on the cost price you typed

Cost of sales uses the single cost price typed on each product. There is no FIFO or weighted-average costing. And no screen lets you change a product's price or cost after creating it.

That puts a lot of weight on the day you create each part. If a part was created with last year's landed cost and the supplier has since raised prices, every sale of it shows a margin that is too high. If an imported part's cost was rounded up, the margin shows too low. Setting cost prices for imported parts covers how to work out a cost that holds.

Questions to ask when the parts margin looks too good

A parts margin that suddenly improves is more often a bookkeeping effect than a buying triumph. Go down this list:

• Were parts typed onto invoices? Then their sale went to account 4100 with no cost of sales, and their purchase cost sits elsewhere. Labour looks richer, parts look thinner or vanish. Why parts on a workshop invoice do not leave stock explains the fix.
• Are cost prices out of date? Check the cost on your top-selling items against the latest supplier invoices.
• Did stock go missing? Stock counts, wastage and transfers do not post to the general ledger; only till sales and till returns move the inventory account. Shrinkage found in a count will not show as a cost unless your accountant posts it.
• Were parts given away on warranty or comeback jobs? If they were rung up at nil, the cost still posts but the revenue does not. That is a real cost; make sure it is the one you expected.
• Is the period right? The year-to-date preset in management accounts starts on 1 January, not on your own financial year start, so set the dates yourself if your year starts elsewhere.

A monthly habit

Each month, export the income statement as CSV, put parts revenue, parts cost and labour revenue side by side for the last few months, and look at the trend rather than one month alone. The same reading discipline that partners in a consultancy apply to their monthly pack, described in a monthly management pack for partners, works just as well on a workshop floor. Start with last month's figures this week.

The service is done. The adviser opens a new invoice and types it out: an oil filter, engine oil, a set of wiper blades, and the labour. The customer pays and drives away. At month end the parts manager counts the shelf and finds the stock list still thinks the filter and the blades are there.

Nothing is broken. A typed invoice line simply is not a stock movement in Achekam. Once a workshop knows that, it can arrange its counter so that parts leave stock when they leave the building. This article explains why it happens and the split that keeps stock right.

Typed invoice lines and what they post

Customer invoices are built from typed lines. A line cannot be picked from the business's product list, so the invoice has no idea that "oil filter" is the same thing as the oil filter in your Item Master. Because of that, invoices do not move stock and do not post cost of sales.

They also all post to one revenue account, Professional Services Revenue (4100), and a line cannot name another sales account. So a parts line on an invoice is recorded as service income, with no cost beside it, and the part stays on the stock list.

The till takes parts off stock; the invoice does not

The till behaves differently. A till sale takes the sold quantity off stock in the same step, at the till's own location, and refuses to go below nil unless the business allows negative stock. The same sale posts a balanced journal: the payment to its own account, revenue, output VAT, and cost of sales against inventory at the product's cost price.

In short:

Selling parts at the till on the customer's account

The obvious worry is the customer who does not pay on the day: the fleet operator, the taxi owner with several vehicles, the dealer down the road. The till refuses a sale that is not paid in full, but it can charge a sale to a trade customer's account.

Charging to account writes a receivables invoice for that customer and checks the account's hold and credit limit, unless a supervisor or manager overrides it with a reason. The parts still leave stock and still post cost of sales, because it is still a till sale. Trade customers are created on the Wholesale screen, which needs the Wholesale add-on. Manufacturers who run a trade counter use the same mechanism; a trade counter on account walks through it from their side.

Labour on the invoice, parts through the till: a split that works

For most workshops the cleanest routine is:

1. Parts are rung up at the till against the job, paid on collection or charged to the customer's account.
2. Labour goes on a customer invoice, typed as usual.
3. The customer receives the till receipt or account invoice for parts, and the labour invoice, and you file both with the job card.

A worked example in words: a fleet customer's van comes in for a service. The adviser rings up the filter, oil and brake pads at the till and charges them to the fleet's account. The labour goes on an invoice to the same fleet. At month end the fleet's statement shows both, the parts have left stock, and your income statement shows parts revenue with its cost in one place and labour in another. That separation is what lets you read your parts margin, as seeing parts margin apart from labour explains.

The one discipline it needs: nobody types a part onto a labour invoice "just this once". Make it a rule at the service desk.

Checking stock after a busy week

Even with the split in place, check. A missed scan, a part taken for a comeback job, or a box opened for one bolt will put the shelf and the list apart.

With the Warehousing add-on, Achekam keeps stock locations, such as the main store, a workshop bin or a service van, with the quantity on hand at each. A stock count sets a location's quantity to what was counted and records the difference as an adjustment.

Two points to keep in mind:

• Stock counts, wastage and transfers do not post to the general ledger; only till sales and till returns move the inventory account. When a count finds a difference, tell your accountant so it can be put through the books.
• Counting everything once a year finds problems too late. Many workshops count a few fast-moving lines every week instead. AccountingTools explains cycle counting, counting a small part of inventory every day so the whole stock is counted over time instead of in one annual count.

A short Friday list:

• count the top fast movers: filters, oil, brake pads, wiper blades, bulbs;
• compare with the stock quantity and note every difference;
• look for parts typed on invoices that week and ring them through the till if they were not;
• pass the differences to whoever keeps the books.

Getting the counter right

Set up your parts in the Item Master with clear SKUs, which parts stock, SKUs and barcodes covers, and then brief every adviser and counter hand on the split above. Run it for a month and count the same lines at the end; the gap between shelf and list should close.

A parts counter lives or dies by how quickly it can find things. A fitter asks for front brake pads for a particular model, the counter assistant scans the barcode on the box, and the till shows nothing. Now somebody is searching by description, guessing between two similar part names, and the customer behind the fitter is waiting.

Parts are also where workshop stock quietly drifts. Filters walk out to the workshop floor without being booked, a supplier's delivery is shelved but never recorded, and the stock figure in the system stops meaning anything.

This article explains how Achekam handles parts sold at the counter: how parts are set up, how a scanner finds them, how stock moves, and the limits that make careful set-up worth the effort.

Creating parts in the Item Master

Parts are products, and products are created in the Item Master in the Accounting menu. Each one carries a SKU, a name, a category, a selling price, a cost price, an opening quantity and a VAT treatment. The Item Master needs the Point of Sale, Warehousing or Wholesale add-on.

For a parts department, the category is worth thinking about before you start. Grouping by system, such as brakes, filters, electrical, suspension and body, makes the list usable for people who do not know a part number by heart.

A scan finds a part only when the code matches its SKU

At the time of writing, no screen lets a business record a separate barcode for a product. A scanner at the till therefore finds a part only when the code it scans matches the part's SKU.

That leaves two practical approaches:

You can also mix the two: barcode-as-SKU for fast-moving boxed items like filters and plugs, and their own codes for loose or unboxed parts. Whatever you choose, be consistent within a category so the counter staff know what to expect. Investopedia's guide to stock-keeping units explains how retailers build and use SKUs to track stock levels and sales, and how a SKU differs from a UPC barcode.

Stock leaves at the till's location

When a part is sold at the till, the sold quantity comes off stock in the same step, at the location the till was opened at. If you run a front counter and a workshop store, open each till at the location its parts physically come from, so the quantities stay true for each.

With the Warehousing add-on, a business keeps stock locations such as warehouses, stores, bins and vans, with the quantity on hand at each. A service van carrying common parts can be its own location.

Negative stock: allow it or refuse it

If a sale would take a part's quantity negative, the till refuses it, unless the business has chosen to allow negative stock.

Refusing is the stricter choice, and for most parts counters the better one. A part that shows as out of stock but is physically on the shelf is a signal that something was received without being recorded, and it is better to find out at the counter than at the year-end count. Allowing negative stock keeps the counter moving on a busy Saturday, but the negative quantities then need someone to investigate them every week.

Cost of sales from a single cost price

Every till sale posts a journal in the same step, including cost of sales against inventory at the product's cost price. In Achekam that cost is the single cost price typed on the product. There is no FIFO or weighted-average costing.

For parts whose supplier price changes often, that means the cost of sales on each sale reflects the cost price you entered, not the price you paid for the particular box on the shelf. Your accountant may want to review margins on frequently repriced lines at month end.

Prices and costs that cannot be edited yet

At the time of writing, no screen lets a business change a product's price, cost or VAT treatment after creating it, or deactivate it. For a parts catalogue that is the most important limit to plan around. Before creating each part:

1. Check the selling price against your current price list.
2. Enter the cost price you expect to pay on your next order.
3. Confirm the VAT treatment with your accountant.
4. Get the SKU right, especially if it is the barcode number.
5. Have a second person check a batch of new parts before you create them.

Getting new stock onto the shelves

Two more limits affect how quantities change. Goods received against a purchase order do not add stock, and stock counts, wastage, transfers and opening quantities do not post to the general ledger; only till sales and till returns move the inventory account.

With the Warehousing add-on, a stock count sets a location's quantity to what was counted and records the difference as an adjustment. For a parts department, a regular count of fast-moving lines keeps the quantities believable, and your accountant can adjust the inventory value in the ledger from the count with a manual journal.

Once parts are in place, the next questions are about payment at the counter; see bank transfers at the service counter and recording card payments from the bank terminal.

A technician needs a hose clamp the store does not carry. Someone has to run to the motor spares shop down the road, and they need cash. In many workshops the money comes from wherever it is closest: the cash drawer at the service counter, a tin in the manager's desk, or the runner's own pocket, to be paid back later from either.

Each of these leaves a different trail, or none. The till drawer comes up short at cash-up. The tin's balance stops making sense. The runner's reimbursement is never matched to a receipt. None of it is fraud, but all of it makes the books harder to trust. This article compares the two sensible routes, a separate petty cash tin and a cash paid-out from the till, and explains how each reaches the books.

Two routes, two different trails

Investopedia defines petty cash as a small amount of money a business sets aside for minor, immediate expenses where using cheques or cards would be impractical. A parts run for a clamp, a bottle of brake cleaner, or a courier tip are textbook examples.

A workshop can fund those expenses in two ways:

• A petty cash tin, with a fixed float, kept separately from the till, and topped up from the bank from time to time.
• A paid-out from the till, where the cashier takes money from the drawer for the purchase and records it at the till as cash paid out.

Both can work. The choice depends on who handles the money, how often small purchases happen, and whether the workshop already runs a till.

Cash paid out of the till

If the workshop uses Achekam's till, which comes with the Point of Sale add-on, cash paid out is a recorded event. Safe drops, cash paid in and cash paid out are recorded on the server, and each posts its own journal. Input VAT is claimed on a payout only when a tax invoice number is given.

That last point matters for a parts run. If the runner comes back with a proper tax invoice from the spares shop, the cashier records the payout with the invoice number, and the VAT can be claimed. If the runner comes back with a till slip that is not a valid tax invoice, or no slip at all, the payout posts without input VAT. The rule pushes staff to ask for the right document at the spares counter.

The paid-out route also has a built-in check. At cash-up, the cashier counts the drawer by notes and coins, and the server works out the expected cash, records any difference and posts it to cash over and short. A payout that was recorded reduces the expected cash; one that was not recorded shows up as a shortage. Notes and coins are listed for rand, shilling and naira, so the count works the same way in each country.

A separate petty cash tin

A tin suits a workshop without a till, or one that wants to keep counter takings and workshop spending completely apart. AccountingTools sets out the basic disciplines: petty cash should be disbursed only for minor business expenses, and the fund should be locked at all times when not in use. Each petty cash voucher should show the amount paid out, the type of expense, the date and the person paid, with any receipt attached. AccountingTools' petty cash procedure sets out the full routine.

The tin should always hold the float in some mix of cash and vouchers. If the float is set at a round amount, cash plus vouchers should add back to it at any time. That is what makes a surprise count meaningful.

On the books side, Investopedia explains that petty cash journal entries are recorded when the custodian requests more cash, not when each purchase is made, and that topping up the fund is recorded as a debit to petty cash and a credit to cash. In practice, when the tin is topped up:

1. Total the vouchers since the last top-up by type of expense.
2. Post a journal that charges each expense account and reduces petty cash by the voucher total, with input VAT only where a valid tax invoice supports it.
3. Post the top-up from the bank into petty cash, restoring the float.

In Achekam both are manual journals. A journal that does not balance is refused, as is one dated in a closed month, and a posted journal can be corrected only by a reversal, so top up before the month is closed.

How each shows up at cash-up

The till route gets expenses into the books faster and ties them to a specific shift. The tin route keeps counter takings clean and puts one person in charge of small spending.

Choosing one route and writing it down

Mixing the two is where problems start: a runner takes cash from the till, the receipt goes into the tin, and nobody records either. Pick one route for the workshop, write it down in a few lines, and tell everyone:

• Which route is used, and by whom.
• The largest amount that may be spent without a manager's approval.
• The document to bring back: a tax invoice, not a till slip, wherever possible.
• What happens if the receipt is lost.
• Who counts the tin or checks the payouts, and how often.

For how safe drops and payouts fit together at a retail counter, see safe drops, paid-outs and banking, and for running a petty cash fund well, read petty cash duties and surprise counts.

Small purchases are small one at a time. Recorded the same way every time, they stay that way.

The deal is done on a Saturday. The buyer has chosen the car, the trade-in is agreed and everyone shakes hands. Then the paperwork starts to drift. The copy of the ID arrives by WhatsApp, the proof of address on Tuesday, the offer to purchase is signed on paper and photographed, the deal is never formally approved, and the car is delivered before anyone has issued an invoice. When the file is checked months later, half of it is missing.

South African dealerships sell vehicles under real scrutiny, and a sale file that cannot show what was collected, approved and signed is a risk to the business. The Automotive pack in Achekam's Industry CRM puts a South African vehicle sale through the same five steps every time. This article walks through them.

Five steps from documents to handover

The pack's sale-to-delivery workflow runs in this order:

1. Request the buyer's FICA documents.
2. Send a quotation.
3. Have the sales manager approve the deal.
4. Have the offer to purchase signed electronically.
5. Invoice the vehicle before handover.

The order matters. Documents come before the deal is approved, the approval comes before the customer signs, and the invoice comes before the keys. Each step is a task in the vehicle sale's workflow, so anyone opening the sale can see which steps are done and which are still waiting.

Step one: requesting the FICA documents

The workflow sends the buyer a request for their FICA documents. The buyer answers the request, and that answer moves the task on. Nobody has to chase a WhatsApp photo into a shared folder; the buyer responds to a request that belongs to their sale.

What the request asks for is set by your dealership's own FICA process and compliance officer, not by this article. The pack requests and collects the documents. Checking that they are adequate, and deciding what to do if they are not, remains the job of the person your compliance procedures name. Make sure that person reviews the documents before step three, not after delivery.

Steps two and three: the quotation and the sales manager's approval

With the documents in, the salesperson sends the quotation: the vehicle, the price, any trade-in allowance and the extras. The deal then goes to the sales manager to approve.

The approval is where the dealership checks the deal as a whole: the margin, the trade-in figure, any discount and whether the FICA file is complete. Putting approval before signature is the point of the order: a customer should never sign a deal the dealership has not approved.

Step four: the offer to purchase, signed electronically

The offer to purchase is then sent for electronic signature. Achekam's signing places signature and initials fields on the document, lets signers sign in order or all at once, carries an expiry and reminders, and when everyone has signed, files the signed PDF and a completion certificate back into Documents. An envelope going to someone outside the business must be linked to a client or a CRM lead before it is sent.

Two points to understand about the signature itself:

• It is a simple electronic signature. Achekam's completion certificate cites section 13 of the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act and says the signatures are not advanced electronic signatures. Section 13 itself sets out when an electronic signature is valid and when the law requires an advanced electronic signature. Ask your attorney whether that is sufficient for your offer to purchase and any related documents.
• Ink remains available. If your dealership decides a document must be signed in ink, the pack never offers it for electronic signing. Its step simply tracks the paper copy, so the file still shows whether it came back.

Step five: invoicing the vehicle before handover

The last step invoices the vehicle before handover. In Achekam, an invoice is created as a draft, and issuing it takes the next number in your sequence and posts it to the ledger as debtors, sales and output VAT. South Africa's standard VAT rate is 15% at the time of writing, in force since 1 April 2018; confirm the treatment of each line, including any trade-in and extras, with your accountant.

Invoicing before handover protects the dealership in a simple way: no vehicle leaves without the sale being in the books. When and how the money must be received before the keys go is your policy to set, whether the buyer pays directly or a bank settles the finance.

Starter wording to review

Every contract or agreement in the industry packs, including the offer to purchase, is marked as starter wording that the business must review before use. Have your attorney adapt it to your dealership and the way you trade. Points that commonly need attention include:

• the vehicle description and identifying numbers;
• the price, extras and any trade-in allowance;
• the deposit and what happens to it if finance is declined;
• conditions such as finance approval;
• the delivery date and when risk passes to the buyer.

A checklist for the first sale

• Your compliance officer has defined the FICA documents the request asks for.
• The sales manager knows deals now come to them for approval before signature.
• The offer to purchase has been reviewed by your attorney.
• You have decided which documents, if any, must be signed in ink.
• Accounts know that every vehicle is invoiced before handover.

The workshop side of the same customer relationship, from the first service onwards, is covered in workshop job cards signed electronically. Counter payments are covered in recording card payments from the bank terminal.

Every workshop throws parts away and redoes some work for free. A gasket tears during fitting. An oil seal leaks two days after a service and the car comes back. A batch of pattern brake pads squeals and every set has to be replaced. The customer is not charged for any of it, and rightly so. But somebody pays, and if the books do not show where, the workshop cannot tell whether its comeback rate is acceptable or quietly eating its margin.

Accountants have a useful distinction for this: normal spoilage and abnormal loss. Applying it to a workshop's scrap bin and comeback jobs makes the cost visible, and tells the owner when something has gone wrong rather than merely happened.

Normal spoilage and abnormal loss

AccountingTools defines job costing as accumulating the costs of materials, labour and overhead for a specific job. In that setting, it explains, normal spoilage or scrap is charged to an overhead cost pool for later allocation, while abnormal amounts are charged directly to cost of goods sold. Its guide to job costing explains how the overhead pool and the direct charges work together.

The logic is simple. Some waste is a predictable part of doing the work: if a certain amount of scrap happens on every kind of job, it is a cost of running the workshop, spread across the work done. Waste beyond that level is not a cost of doing the work properly. It is a loss, and hiding it inside overhead would make every job look slightly more expensive instead of showing the one event that caused it.

In workshop terms:

The workshop decides where the line sits, based on its own experience, and writes it down so the same decision is made each month.

Comebacks: redoing a job at no charge

A comeback costs labour and often parts. The parts may be new ones fitted to replace faulty ones; the labour is a technician's time on a job that earns nothing.

AccountingTools explains that labour directly traceable to a job is charged to that job as direct labour, while other labour is recorded in an overhead cost pool as indirect labour and allocated to open jobs. A technician's time on a comeback is traceable, but not to a job that will be invoiced. Treating it as indirect labour, and keeping it in its own account, is what keeps it visible. If it is buried in ordinary workshop wages, the owner sees only that productivity looks low, not why.

Keeping redo labour and parts visible

A few habits make the cost of comebacks measurable:

• Open a comeback job card for every redo, linked to the original job, so the history is clear.
• Record the technician's hours on the comeback card exactly as on a paid job.
• Record the parts used on the comeback, whether new parts or the cost of parts scrapped.
• Note the cause: workmanship, faulty part, misdiagnosis, or customer misuse.
• Review the comeback cards monthly by technician, by supplier and by type of job.

The cause note is what lets a normal comeback be told apart from an abnormal one. Several comebacks in a month from the same batch of parts is a supplier problem, and probably a claim against the supplier.

Stock that goes in the bin

Parts scrapped from stock, whether damaged in the store, past their shelf life, or superseded and unsaleable, are a loss of inventory. Under IAS 2, the amount of any write-down of inventories to net realisable value and all losses of inventories are recognised as an expense in the period in which the write-down or loss occurs. The cost belongs in the month the part was scrapped, not left on the balance sheet until a stock count happens to catch it.

Accounts and journals in Achekam

Each business in Achekam has its own double-entry ledger with a standard chart of accounts created when the books first open, and accounts can be added, renamed or switched off. Add a few accounts that match the distinction:

• Comeback labour, for technician time on redone work.
• Scrap and spoilage, normal, for the routine level of waste.
• Abnormal stock losses, for events beyond the normal level.

One limit matters here. In Achekam, stock counts, wastage, transfers and opening quantities do not post to the general ledger; only till sales and till returns move the inventory account. So scrapping a part in the stock records does not, on its own, take its cost out of inventory in the books. At month end, total the cost of parts scrapped and of parts used on comebacks, and post a manual journal for each category: debit the relevant expense account, credit inventory. For comeback labour, a journal moving the hours' cost from workshop wages to the comeback labour account does the same job.

Achekam refuses a journal that does not balance or that is dated in a closed month, and a posted journal can be corrected only by a reversal. Post these journals as part of the month-end routine, before the month is closed.

What the numbers tell you

Once comebacks and scrap have their own accounts, the management accounts start answering useful questions. Is comeback labour rising as a share of workshop wages? Did abnormal losses spike in a month when a new supplier was used? Is normal scrap stable, or creeping up?

None of these needs a sophisticated costing system. It needs the costs to be put somewhere they can be seen. For how parts and labour margins compare, see parts margin versus labour; for the costing principles behind this article, read job costing basics.

A workshop that knows what its redone work costs can decide whether to accept it, fix it or claim it back. One that does not will simply wonder why the margin is thinner than it should be.

"Nobody told me you were going to replace the brake discs." Every service manager has heard it. The customer dropped the car off for a service, the technician found worn discs, someone phoned, someone thought the customer said yes, and now the bill is twice what the customer expected. Without a signed authorisation, the workshop is arguing about a phone call.

Most workshop disputes come down to the same question: what did the customer agree to, and can you show it? The Automotive pack in Achekam's Industry CRM answers it with a signed job card authorisation, collected electronically before the work starts. This article walks through the service job from check-in to invoice.

The service job as a record

The Automotive pack keeps workshop Service jobs alongside vehicle sales and test drives, each with its parts and labour. A service job is the workshop's single record of a visit: what came in, what the customer authorised, what was done and how it was paid for.

The workflow has four steps:

1. check the vehicle in;
2. have the customer sign the job card authorisation electronically;
3. record the parts and labour; and
4. invoice the job card, or claim from the warranty or plan provider.

Checking the vehicle in

Check-in is the workshop's chance to agree the starting point before anyone picks up a spanner. A good check-in records:

• the customer's name and a phone number that will be answered during the day;
• the vehicle's registration, identifying number and odometer reading;
• the fuel level;
• existing damage, with photographs of each panel;
• valuables left in the vehicle, or a note that there were none;
• the customer's complaint in their own words, not the adviser's diagnosis.

That last point matters more than it looks. "Knocking noise from the front left over bumps" is something a technician can test. "Suspension problem" is a conclusion that may be wrong.

The customer signs the job card authorisation

Once the work is described, the customer signs the job card authorisation electronically. If they are standing at the service desk, they can sign there and then; if they dropped the car off early, the authorisation can reach them by e-mail.

Achekam's document signing places signature and initials fields on the document, lets signers sign in order or all at once, carries an expiry and reminders, and files the signed PDF and a completion certificate back into Documents. In the pack's workflow, it is the customer's signature that moves the job on to its next step.

The authorisation is marked as starter wording that your business must review before use. Have it adapted to say clearly what the customer is authorising, how extra work will be handled, and what happens to replaced parts. If you decide the authorisation must be signed in ink, the pack never offers it for electronic signing and simply tracks the paper copy.

When the technician finds more work

The brake disc problem from the opening is the case to plan for. When a technician finds work beyond the signed authorisation, stop and get a fresh authorisation before doing it. Achekam can send any document for electronic signature, so a short additional authorisation, listing the extra parts and labour and the revised estimate, can reach the customer by e-mail while the car is still on the lift. A signed "yes" takes a little longer than a phone call and saves an argument at collection. For South African workshops, section 15 of the Consumer Protection Act sets the rule that a workshop must give a repair estimate and get the customer's authorisation before doing work or charging for it.

Recording parts and labour

As the job progresses, the parts fitted and the labour performed are recorded on the service job. Record them as you go, not from memory at the end of the day. Each part should be the part actually fitted; each labour line should describe what was done in words the customer will understand when they read the invoice.

Invoicing the job card, or claiming from the provider

When the work is done, one of two things happens:

For a customer invoice, Achekam creates the invoice as a draft, and issuing it gives it the next number in your sequence and posts it to the ledger as debtors, sales and output VAT. Where a visit mixes covered and uncovered work, agree with the provider and the customer which work belongs to whom before the invoice and the claim are raised, so the two do not overlap.

Disputes a signed authorisation prevents

A signed authorisation does not stop every complaint, but it changes the conversation in the workshop's favour:

• "I never asked for that." The signed authorisation shows what was asked for, and an additional authorisation shows what was added.
• "That scratch wasn't there." The check-in photographs show whether it was.
• "The bill is more than you said." If your wording includes the estimate, and it should, the customer signed it.
• "I wanted the old parts back." The authorisation says what happens to them.

Before the next service booking

Have your attorney review the starter authorisation, agree the check-in checklist with your service advisers, and make it a rule that no extra work starts without a signed additional authorisation. Once that discipline is in place, collection day becomes a hand-over rather than a negotiation. Customers who bought their vehicle from you will already know the signing process from their signed offer to purchase, and the vehicle sale pipeline shows where the relationship started.

Ask a dealer principal where the margin on a vehicle sale really goes, and the trade-in will come up quickly. A salesperson keen to close tells the customer their old car is worth a generous figure. The deal is signed, the trade-in arrives in the yard, and the used-vehicle manager discovers it needs tyres, a windscreen and a gearbox repair. The profit on the new sale has been spent on the old one, and nobody can say who agreed the number.

A disciplined trade-in process does not make customers' cars worth less. It makes sure the figure on the deal comes from someone who looked at the vehicle, and is approved by someone accountable for the used-vehicle stock. The Automotive pack in Achekam's Industry CRM builds that process into the vehicle sale.

Trade-ins travel with the vehicle sale

In the Automotive pack, a Vehicle sale can include a trade-in. The trade-in is not a separate deal agreed in the corridor; it sits on the sale it belongs to, so whoever reviews the sale sees the new vehicle, the price and the trade-in allowance together.

The sale moves from Enquiry to Test drive and needs, Deal on the table, Finance applied for, Offer signed and Delivered, or is Lost with a reason. In practice, the trade-in needs to be settled by the time the deal is put on the table, because the customer's decision usually depends on it.

Inspecting the trade-in

In the pack, the trade-in is inspected first. What a good inspection covers is your dealership's call, but most used-vehicle managers want answers to the same questions:

• Identity and papers. Do the registration papers match the vehicle? Is there outstanding finance on it, and how much will it take to settle?
• History. Is there a service book or service records? Does the mileage make sense with them?
• Condition. Bodywork, glass, tyres, interior, and any signs of accident repair.
• Mechanical. A short drive and a look underneath: engine, gearbox, brakes, suspension, warning lights.
• Completeness. Spare keys, the manuals, the spare wheel and tools.

Write the findings down at the time, with photographs. A trade-in figure without an inspection record is just an opinion.

The allowance is the appraiser's figure

After the inspection, the trade-in allowance is the appraiser's figure. The pack has no valuation engine: it does not look up a guide price, scan auction results or suggest a number.

That is a deliberate choice, and it keeps responsibility clear. The appraiser uses whatever sources your dealership trusts, such as trade guides, recent auction prices and your own sales history, together with the inspection, and puts their name to a figure. If the trade-in later turns out to have been over-valued, the dealership can go back to the appraisal and the evidence behind it, and learn from it.

A useful habit: the appraiser records not just the figure but the main reasons for it, such as "needs two tyres and a service" or "low mileage, full history". Those notes make the approval step quicker and the eventual resale easier.

Approval by the used-vehicle manager

The appraiser's figure is then approved by the used-vehicle manager, the person who will have to sell the vehicle on. That is the right person to approve: if the allowance is too high, it is their stock that carries the loss.

Keep three roles apart wherever the size of the dealership allows:

In a small dealership one person may wear two hats. Even then, the salesperson closing the deal should not be the one approving the trade-in. This is segregation of duties, which AccountingTools explains as assigning the steps in a process to different people so that no one can both commit and conceal theft or error.

A trade-in in words

A customer arrives to look at a new bakkie and wants to trade in their sedan. The salesperson books the test drive and asks the appraiser to look at the sedan while the customer is out. The appraiser drives it, notes worn tyres and a missing spare key, checks the service book, photographs the scratches on the rear bumper and proposes an allowance with those reasons. The used-vehicle manager reads the notes, agrees the figure and approves it. When the customer returns, the salesperson can put a complete deal on the table, with a trade-in figure the dealership will stand behind.

The trade-in on the deal

Once approved, the allowance is part of the deal put to the customer. In the Industry CRM, some pipeline stages can only be entered once set conditions are met, such as a customer being named or an amount being set, which helps keep a deal from moving on with blanks in it.

A common temptation deserves a firm rule. When a deal is close and the customer wants more for their trade-in, the sales manager may be willing to give a better overall price. Record that as a discount on the new vehicle, not as a higher trade-in allowance. The used-vehicle stock then carries its true value, the new-vehicle margin shows the real discount, and the next appraisal is not distorted by a figure that was never about the car.

Getting it right from the first trade-in

Agree what the inspection covers, name your appraisers and your used-vehicle manager, and make the discount rule explicit to the sales team. The rest of the sale then follows the pipeline described in vehicle sales from enquiry to delivery. Once the customer is driving their new vehicle, the workshop relationship begins; workshop job cards signed electronically covers that side.

A used-car dealer's stock is not shelves of identical boxes. Every unit is different: its own make and model, mileage, condition and price, bought from a trade-in, an auction or a private seller. Each one ties up a large amount of money, and each one is sold once.

Can Achekam carry that kind of stock? Yes, with care. A vehicle can be an item with its own cost and selling price, and the till can take it out of stock when it is sold. But there are limits that matter a great deal for vehicles, and a dealer who knows them in advance keeps a cleaner set of books.

Each vehicle as an item with its own cost

Items are created in the Item Master in the Accounting menu. Each has a SKU, name, category, selling price, cost price, opening quantity and VAT treatment. The Item Master needs the Point of Sale, Warehousing or Wholesale add-on.

For a vehicle, a sensible pattern is:

• SKU: your own stock number, short and unique, written on the windscreen card;
• Name: make, model, derivative and colour, so staff can find it;
• Category: used vehicles, or demo vehicles if you carry them;
• Opening quantity: one;
• Cost price: what you paid, or the trade-in allowance you gave;
• Selling price: your asking price.

Details that cannot be edited once the item is created

This is the limit to understand first. No screen lets a business change a product's price, cost or VAT treatment after creating it, or deactivate it.

For vehicles that bites in three places:

1. The asking price. Used vehicles are often repriced after a few weeks on the floor. The item keeps the price you typed. At the till, line and whole-sale discounts can bring the selling price down, and above the business's cashier limit only a supervisor or manager can give them.
2. The cost. Anything spent after the item was created cannot be added to its cost.
3. Sold units. A sold vehicle cannot be deactivated, so it stays in the list with nothing on hand. Use a clear naming habit so sold units are easy to skip.

Selling at the till versus selling on an invoice

How you record the sale decides whether the vehicle leaves stock.

At the till, the sale takes the quantity off stock in the same step and posts a balanced journal: the payment to its own account, revenue, output VAT, and cost of sales against inventory at the item's cost price. But the server refuses any till sale that is not paid in full. A cash buyer or a buyer who has already transferred the full price fits; a financed deal with a deposit now and a payout later does not.

On an invoice, the deposit and the finance house's payout can be recorded as separate payments against one invoice. But invoice lines are typed in and cannot be picked from the product list, so the invoice does not take the vehicle out of stock and does not post cost of sales.

Why an invoice does not take the vehicle out of stock

If you sell a financed vehicle on an invoice, three things follow:

• the vehicle still shows one on hand in the stock list;
• the inventory account still carries its cost;
• the month's income statement shows the sale but not what the car cost you.

The stock list can be put right with a count if you hold the Warehousing add-on, but stock counts do not post to the general ledger; only till sales and till returns move the inventory account. So the books need a journal from your accountant that moves the vehicle's cost from inventory to cost of sales. Achekam accepts manual journals, refuses one that does not balance or is dated in a closed month, and corrects a posted journal only by a reversal. Agree that journal as a monthly routine, listing every vehicle sold on invoice.

Reconditioning costs and the single cost price

Most trade-ins need work before sale: tyres, a service, panel repairs, a valet, a roadworthy. Cost of sales uses the single cost price typed on the item, with no averaging, and that cost cannot be changed later. So either finish reconditioning before creating the item, which is rarely practical, or keep the extra costs on your register and have them added to cost of sales by journal when the vehicle is sold.

The accounting standard behind this is IAS 2. The IFRS Foundation's summary of IAS 2 Inventories explains how the cost of inventories is determined, which cost formulas may be used, and why inventories are carried at the lower of cost and net realisable value. That last point matters on a car lot: a vehicle that has sat too long may be worth less than it cost, and your accountant will want to know.

A vehicle register to keep beside the ledger

Keep one register, a spreadsheet is fine, with a row per vehicle:

• stock number (the SKU), VIN and registration;
• date bought and where from, with the trade-in deal or purchase invoice reference;
• purchase cost, then each reconditioning bill with its supplier bill number;
• total cost to date;
• asking price, and any price change with the date;
• date sold, the buyer, the till receipt or invoice number, and how it was paid;
• whether the cost has been moved to cost of sales.

Check the register against the stock list every month, before the books are closed.

Where to go next

If you also sell parts, the same item rules apply to them; parts stock, SKUs and barcodes sets them out, and why parts on a workshop invoice do not leave stock explains the invoice limit from the workshop's side. Importers will find the single-cost problem handled in setting cost prices for imported parts. Start by setting up the next trade-in as an item and adding its row to the register.

Two silver hatchbacks of the same model and year sit side by side on the lot. One was bought at auction, needed new tyres and a respray, and cost the dealership considerably more than the other, which came in as a clean trade-in. When the first one sells, what was its cost of sale?

If the books use an average of the two, both sales report a margin that neither actually earned. The dealer principal cannot tell which purchase was a good one, which salesperson negotiated well, or whether auction stock is worth buying at all. For vehicles, there is a better answer, and the accounting standard on inventories points to it.

Unique items, unique costs

Under IAS 2, the cost of inventory items that are not ordinarily interchangeable is assigned by specific identification of their individual costs. The IFRS Foundation's page on IAS 2 Inventories sets out the standard's requirements on cost formulas and when each applies.

Investopedia describes the specific identification method as using the actual cost of each unit sold, and notes that it is typically used for unique items such as cars, real estate and precious jewels. A used vehicle is about as far from interchangeable as stock gets: each has its own purchase price, its own reconditioning bill, its own mileage and condition. Even new vehicles of the same model often differ in specification, options and the price paid.

So the cost of a vehicle sold should be that vehicle's own cost: what was paid for it, plus the costs of getting it ready for sale, such as reconditioning, roadworthy or inspection work, and transport to the lot.

Average cost and FIFO for parts

The parts department is different. A box of oil filters for one model contains identical items, bought in batches at slightly different prices over time. Tracking the cost of each individual filter would be pointless.

IAS 2 deals with this case too. The cost of items that are ordinarily interchangeable, generally large quantities of individually insignificant items, is assigned using the first-in, first-out or the weighted average cost formula. Investopedia explains that the average cost method values goods sold at the average price of all goods in stock, smoothing out the effect of unusually high or low purchase costs.

A dealership therefore typically runs two costing approaches side by side: specific identification for vehicles, and FIFO or weighted average for parts.

How Achekam costs a sale

Achekam's Item Master, in the Accounting menu, lists and creates products on the server with an SKU, name, category, selling price, cost price, opening quantity and VAT treatment. It needs the Point of Sale, Warehousing or Wholesale add-on.

When a sale goes through the till and reaches the server, Achekam posts a balanced journal in the same step: the payment to its own account, revenue, output VAT, and cost of sales against inventory at the product's cost price. Cost of sales uses the single cost price typed on the product. Achekam does not calculate FIFO or weighted-average cost.

That limitation is less awkward for vehicles than it sounds.

Setting up each vehicle as its own item

Specific identification fits a system with one cost price per item as long as each vehicle is its own item. Create a separate product for every vehicle in stock:

• SKU: the dealership's stock number, or the VIN.
• Name: make, model, year and colour, so it can be found quickly.
• Category: new, used, demo, or whatever grouping the dealership reports on.
• Cost price: that vehicle's own cost, including reconditioning and other costs of getting it ready for sale.
• Selling price: the advertised price.
• Opening quantity: one.

When the vehicle sells at the till, cost of sales posts at exactly that vehicle's cost. Because there is only one unit, there is no averaging to worry about.

Parts with one cost price

For parts, a single cost price per product is a simplification. Where purchase prices are stable, it may be close enough. Where they move, for example on imported parts affected by exchange rates, the cost price on the product and the actual cost of the parts sold will drift apart.

Keep the cost price on each part as close to current cost as your process allows, and ask your accountant to compare inventory and cost of sales with a FIFO or weighted-average calculation at month end or at least at year end. Any adjustment is posted as a manual journal. Achekam refuses a journal that does not balance or that is dated in a closed month, and corrects a posted journal only by a reversal.

When costs change after the vehicle is loaded

The common snag with vehicles is timing. A trade-in is loaded into stock on the day it arrives, at its purchase price. A week later it gets new tyres and a service, and its true cost goes up. If it sells before anyone updates the product, cost of sales posts at the old figure.

Two habits keep this under control:

1. Load late or update early. Either load the vehicle once its reconditioning is complete, or make sure the cost price is brought up to date before it is offered for sale.
2. Reconcile monthly. Compare each vehicle sold with its costing sheet: purchase invoice, reconditioning invoices, and other costs. Where the cost of sales posted differs from the costing sheet, post a journal for the difference.

The monthly reconciliation also catches a reconditioning invoice that arrives after the car has gone, which is common with outside body shops.

For keeping track of each vehicle while it waits for a buyer, see used vehicles in stock; for the parts side, read costing imported parts.

A dealership that knows what each vehicle really cost knows what each deal really made. That is the point of costing them one at a time.

Every dealership has a version of the same Monday meeting. The sales manager goes round the room asking about deals. One salesperson's "hot prospect" turns out to be someone who took a brochure three weeks ago. Another has a buyer waiting on finance but cannot say since when. A third lost a deal on Saturday and nobody knows why. At the end, the dealer principal still cannot say how many cars will deliver this month.

A sales pipeline replaces that meeting's guesswork with records. The Automotive pack in Achekam's Industry CRM follows each vehicle sale from the first enquiry to the day the customer drives away, using stages every salesperson recognises. This article explains those stages, what happens to deals that are lost, and what the pack deliberately leaves to other people and systems.

Three kinds of record for a dealership

The Automotive pack is built for vehicle dealerships, and it keeps three kinds of record:

• Vehicle sales, which can include trade-ins;
• Service jobs, the workshop's work, with parts and labour; and
• Test drives.

The words on the screens, the stages, the workflows and the documents to request and sign are all set by the pack, so salespeople work in their own language rather than a generic "opportunity" screen. This article is about vehicle sales; the workshop side is covered in workshop job cards signed electronically.

Test drives deserve their own records. A paper diary at reception rarely says who drove which vehicle, when, and what they thought of it afterwards; a record per test drive does, and it gives the salesperson something concrete to follow up on.

A sale often begins as a lead, from a website enquiry, a walk-in or a phone call. Converting the lead creates the customer and the vehicle sale at once and starts the sale's workflow, so the salesperson does not retype the customer's details.

The stages of a vehicle sale

Each vehicle sale moves through six stages, or leaves the pipeline as lost:

The stages describe facts, not feelings. A deal is "on the table" when a specific offer exists, not when the salesperson feels good about it. That is what makes the pipeline useful in Monday's meeting.

If the customer is trading in a vehicle, the appraisal and its approval travel with the sale; see trade-ins: appraisal and manager approval.

Lost, with a reason

A sale that does not go ahead is marked Lost with a reason. That rule is easy to resent and very valuable to keep. A pipeline that only records wins tells you nothing about why customers walk away.

Agree a short list of reasons with your sales team, for example:

• price or deal terms;
• finance declined;
• trade-in value not accepted;
• vehicle not available in time;
• bought elsewhere;
• customer stopped responding.

Review the lost reasons monthly. If many deals are lost at finance, the conversation is with the finance office and the banks. If many are lost on trade-in value, it is with the used-vehicle manager. Neither conversation can happen without the reasons.

Conditions on moving a deal forward

In the Industry CRM, a record cannot move into some pipeline stages until set conditions are met, such as a customer being named, an amount being set or a signature being done. Conditions like these stop a sale running ahead of the facts. A stage that requires a signature, for example, cannot be reached until the signature task is done.

Check which conditions your pack's stages carry and explain them to the sales team, so that a stage refusing to move is understood as a missing step, not a fault.

What stays outside the pack

The Automotive pack follows the sale. It does not do three things that belong to other people and systems:

1. It applies for no finance. "Finance applied for" records that the application was submitted by your finance and insurance staff through the banks' own channels.
2. It runs no credit check. Credit decisions are the lenders' and your finance office's.
3. It does not register or license vehicles. Vehicle registration and licensing are done by a person outside the pack.

Being clear about this avoids a common misunderstanding: the pipeline shows where a deal stands, but it is not the system that approves or registers anything.

Reading the pipeline

The pack's home page shows counts drawn from the records, the tasks or the ledger, never typed in by hand. For a sales manager, the useful ones include records in each stage, pipeline value, deals won this month and revenue this month. "How many cars will deliver this month?" starts with a look at how many sales have reached Offer signed, rather than a round of the room. Investopedia's guide to customer relationship management sets out the sales, service and forecasting processes a CRM covers, and the types of CRM technology businesses use.

Before you switch it on

Agree the meaning of each stage with your sales team, write down the lost reasons, and make sure the finance office knows that "Finance applied for" is theirs to update. Then the Monday meeting can start from the pipeline instead of from memory.

A dealership is several businesses under one roof. It sells new and used vehicles, it runs a workshop, it sells parts, and it earns commission from the banks and plan providers whose products it arranges for customers. Each of those has a different margin, a different risk and a different manager. Yet in many dealerships' books, everything except vehicle sales is lumped into one line, and the dealer principal cannot tell whether the workshop pays its way or is being carried by finance commissions.

The Automotive pack in Achekam's Industry CRM sets up the ledger so that those streams arrive in their own accounts from the first invoice. This article explains what the pack adds, how the invoice lines post, and the decisions that remain yours.

What the pack adds when it is switched on

Switching on an industry pack adds that industry's revenue accounts to the chart of accounts and its starter items, without prices, to the catalogue. The Automotive pack's starter catalogue lists:

• workshop labour;
• scheduled services;
• diagnostics;
• pre-delivery preparation; and
• finance and warranty-plan commissions.

These post to two revenue accounts, 4390 and 4400, which the pack adds to your chart. If either code is already used in your chart for a different type of account, activation is refused and the clashing account is named, so your accountant can resolve it before trying again. Nothing is quietly renumbered.

Commission income is not workshop income

The two kinds of income on the starter list behave very differently.

Workshop income, from labour, scheduled services, diagnostics and pre-delivery preparation, depends on technician hours, bay capacity and how efficiently jobs are run. It tells you whether the workshop is busy and whether it is priced right.

Commission income, from finance and warranty plans arranged for vehicle buyers, depends on how many vehicles you sell and how many of those buyers take finance or a plan. It is closer to the sales floor than to the workshop, and it can disappear quickly if lenders change their terms.

Mixing the two hides both. A strong month of commissions can mask an idle workshop; a busy workshop can mask falling attachment of plans on the sales floor. The pack's items post to two accounts rather than one, and each invoice line names its account. When you activate the pack, check with your accountant which item posts where, so the monthly management accounts show the split you want without anyone re-sorting a single sales account.

From an accepted quotation to a draft invoice

Larger workshop jobs and many vehicle-related services start with a quotation. In the Industry CRM, a customer accepts a quotation on a link by typing their name and ticking a box, and that acceptance drafts the invoice in receivables.

Several safeguards come with it:

• a quotation, once sent, is frozen and changed only by a revision, so the customer accepts exactly what they were shown;
• the customer's IP address and browser are kept with the acceptance; and
• the invoice is created as a draft for review; issuing it straight away on acceptance needs an administrator's recorded authority.

Invoice lines that carry their own account

With the pack, every invoice line names the revenue account and the product it sells. Revenue posts to the account each line names, and cost of sales is posted in the same journal.

A service invoice in words

A customer's vehicle comes in for a scheduled service and a warning light. The invoice has four lines: the scheduled service, a diagnostic, the labour to replace a sensor, and the sensor itself. The service, the diagnostic and the labour lines post to the revenue accounts their items name. The sensor line names the part sold, so its revenue posts as that line specifies, and the cost of the sensor goes to cost of sales in the same journal. When the dealer principal looks at the month's figures, workshop labour, diagnostic income and parts margin can each be seen for what they are. Investopedia explains gross margin, the share of sales revenue a business keeps after the direct costs of what it sells, and how to calculate it.

Commission works the same way on a different invoice: when the dealership bills a bank or a plan provider for commission earned, the line names the commission item and posts to the account that item names, not to whatever account the last workshop job used.

Prices are yours to set

None of the starter items carries a price. Before the first invoice, decide:

1. Your labour rate, and whether it differs for diagnostics, electrical work or specialist repairs.
2. Scheduled service prices, fixed per model and interval, or built up from labour and parts each time.
3. Pre-delivery preparation: whether it is charged to the buyer as a line on the vehicle invoice or absorbed as a cost of the sale.
4. How commissions are billed, per deal or in a monthly statement to each bank or provider, and who checks them against what was sold.
5. The VAT treatment of each item, confirmed with your accountant for your country.

Before you activate the pack

Ask your accountant to confirm that the two account codes are free and how the new accounts should appear in your management pack. Price the starter items, and agree who reviews draft invoices created by quote acceptance before they are issued. Counter payments for those invoices, by card or by transfer, are covered in recording card payments from the bank terminal and bank transfers at the service counter, and the parts themselves are set up as described in parts stock at the counter.

"I never agreed to that." Every South African service adviser has heard it at the counter, usually about an invoice that came out higher than the customer expected. Sometimes the customer did agree, over the phone, to a technician who has since gone home. Sometimes nobody asked. Either way, the workshop is arguing about money it may not be entitled to charge.

Section 15 of the Consumer Protection Act deals with exactly this situation. It sets out when a repair or maintenance provider may charge for its work, what it may charge for an estimate, and what happens when the job grows. This article explains the section, as published on Acts Online, in workshop terms, and how to keep the proof you need.

When section 15 applies

Section 15 applies to repair and maintenance transactions above a monetary threshold that the Minister prescribes in the Government Gazette, where the provider takes possession of the consumer's property, or where the consumer asks for an estimate. A car left at a workshop for a repair is the textbook case of taking possession.

The threshold is set by notice and can change, so check the current figure rather than relying on memory. In practice, many workshops simply apply the section 15 routine to every job where they keep the car, which avoids having to decide case by case.

The full text is on Acts Online's page for section 15, pre-authorisation of repair or maintenance services.

The three lawful routes to charging

Section 15 says a repair or maintenance provider must not charge for the work unless one of these happened first:

1. An authorised estimate. The workshop gave the consumer an estimate that meets the prescribed requirements, and the consumer then authorised the work.
2. A declined estimate, with authorisation. The consumer, in writing or another recorded form, declined an estimate and authorised the work anyway.
3. A pre-authorised maximum. The consumer, in writing or another recorded form, pre-authorised charges up to a specified maximum.

The second and third routes depend on a written or recorded form. A verbal "just fix it" at the counter, with nothing written down, leaves the workshop with no evidence of which route was used.

Charging for the estimate itself

Finding out what is wrong often takes real work: a diagnostic scan, stripping down a gearbox, removing a cylinder head. Section 15(3) says a provider may not charge for preparing an estimate, including diagnostic work, disassembly or reassembly, or parts damaged in preparing the estimate, unless it disclosed the price of the estimate beforehand and the consumer approved it.

So if the workshop wants to be paid for a strip-down, or for reassembling a gearbox the customer then decides not to repair, that charge has to be priced and approved before the work starts. It is good practice to make the estimate charge a line on the check-in form, separately signed.

When the job grows

The commonest dispute is the job that turns out bigger than expected. A service reveals worn brake discs; a clutch replacement reveals a leaking rear main seal. Section 15(4) says a supplier that has given an estimate may not charge more than the estimate unless it told the consumer about the additional estimated charges and the consumer authorised the work to continue.

The practical rule for the workshop floor: stop, call, record. The technician stops at the point where extra work is needed. The service adviser contacts the customer with the extra work and its estimated price. The customer's authorisation is recorded before the technician carries on.

Plain language

The dtic's booklet on the Consumer Protection Act, dated April 2020, says consumers have the right to information and contracts in plain and understandable language. An estimate full of part codes and abbreviations does not help a customer make an informed decision. Describe the work and the parts in words a car owner understands.

Sending the estimate for signature in Achekam

Achekam does not prepare section 15 estimates for you, and it cannot tell whether your estimate meets the prescribed requirements. What it can do is make the authorisation easy to obtain and impossible to lose.

Any document can be sent for electronic signature, with signature and initials fields placed on it, signers in order or all at once, an expiry and reminders. The document can be an uploaded PDF, a document composed from text blocks with merge fields, or a saved template. When the customer signs, the signed PDF and a completion certificate are filed back into Documents.

An envelope with a signer from outside the business must be linked to a client or a CRM lead before it is sent, so the customer has to exist in Achekam first. That is a useful discipline: the signed estimate is tied to the customer's record from the start.

One limit to know: a business cannot yet save a plain sales quote in Achekam and later turn it into an invoice. Quotes on the Billing & Finance and Smart Accounting pages live only in the browser and are lost on reload. For now, prepare the estimate as a document, send it for signature, and keep the signed copy as the authoritative version.

Invoicing only what was authorised

When the work is done, create the customer invoice as a draft, which can be changed or deleted until it is issued. Before issuing, compare it line by line with the signed estimate and any recorded authorisations for extra work. Anything on the draft that nobody authorised should come off. Issuing takes the next number in the sequence and posts the invoice to the ledger as debtors, sales and output VAT.

Then file the evidence together. Document Centre is a folder-based store where a business uploads files or whole folders, previews, downloads, renames, moves, tags and searches them, and a new version keeps earlier ones. A folder per job, holding the check-in form, the signed estimate, any extra authorisations and the invoice, answers "I never agreed to that" in one place.

For how parts should appear on the bill, see parts on workshop invoices; for the evidence an e-signature leaves behind, read e-signature certificates by country.

Section 15 rewards workshops that ask before they charge. The paperwork is simply how you show you asked.

A buyer took delivery of a used SUV six weeks ago, financed through a bank. The gearbox has started slipping, the buyer says it was faulty from the start, and the dealership disagrees. The buyer's next message is a threat: "I'm stopping the debit order until you fix it."

For the buyer, that feels like leverage. In practice it is usually a mistake, and the dealer who understands why can give better advice, defuse the situation and keep the complaint on a track that can actually be resolved. This article explains how the two contracts in a financed vehicle sale relate to each other in South Africa, what the Motor Industry Ombudsman says about disputes, and what the dealer should record until the matter is closed.

Two contracts, not one

A financed vehicle sale involves two separate agreements. The first is the sale: the buyer buys the vehicle from the dealer. The second is the finance agreement: the bank lends the buyer the money, or sells the vehicle to the buyer on instalment terms, and the dealer is paid by the bank.

The Motor Industry Ombudsman of South Africa (MIOSA) warns consumers that the finance agreement with the bank is separate from the consumer's contract with the dealer. A dispute with the dealer therefore does not suspend the instalments. MIOSA's guidance on submitting a motor vehicle complaint sets this out alongside the complaint process.

Why the instalments keep running

MIOSA's warning goes further. A bank that is not paid may repossess and sell the vehicle and take legal action for the balance. A buyer who stops paying because of a quality dispute with the dealer can therefore end up without the car, still owing money, and with the original complaint unresolved.

A dealer who explains this early, calmly and in writing, often prevents the situation from escalating. It is not the dealer's job to give the buyer legal advice, but pointing the buyer to MIOSA's own guidance is a helpful step that costs nothing.

When the bank may be a supplier too

MIOSA adds a qualification: depending on the agreement, the bank may in certain circumstances also be regarded as a supplier under the Consumer Protection Act. Whether that applies depends on the finance agreement and the facts, which is a question for the buyer and their advisers, not for the dealer to decide. The dealer should be aware that the bank may become involved, and keep its own records in a state it would be comfortable sharing.

The complaint ladder and response times

MIOSA tells consumers to raise a complaint first with the selling or servicing dealer, then to insist on a manufacturer's representative reviewing it, then to contact the manufacturer's customer care department, and only then to approach MIOSA, keeping records at each step. That means the dealer is the first rung, and how it handles the complaint at that stage shapes everything that follows.

Once a complaint reaches MIOSA, MIOSA says a dealer or other industry participant is given 10 days to respond. If a supplier still refuses to take part in conciliation after three attempts, the complainant is told within 22 days. A dealer that has kept a clear file can respond within that window; one that has to reconstruct events from memory will struggle.

Prescription does not pause for a complaint

There is a timing point that matters to both sides. MIOSA says that lodging a complaint with MIOSA or the National Consumer Commission does not interrupt prescription. It cites NCC v The Turbo Man CC, in which the National Consumer Tribunal held that it cannot entertain a matter referred to it more than three years after the cause of action.

For the dealer, this is a reason to keep records of every vehicle sale and every complaint for at least as long as a claim could run, and not to assume a dispute is over because it went quiet.

What to record while the dispute runs

Keep one file per disputed vehicle and add to it as things happen:

• The original sale documents: offer to purchase, invoice, delivery checklist and any disclosures about condition.
• The finance house's approval and payment advice.
• The buyer's complaint, in their words, with the date received.
• Every inspection, diagnostic report and job card for the vehicle since the sale.
• Every message to and from the buyer, the manufacturer and MIOSA.
• Any offer made, and the buyer's response.

Achekam's Document Centre is a folder-based store where a business uploads files or whole folders, previews, downloads, renames, moves, tags, archives and searches them. A new version of a file keeps the earlier ones, so a revised inspection report does not overwrite the first.

Recording a settlement

Most disputes end in a settlement: a repair at the dealer's cost, a partial refund, or occasionally the deal unwinding. Each needs to be recorded properly.

• A partial refund or price reduction. In Achekam a credit note is issued from the invoice it corrects, in full or for chosen lines, posted to the ledger, and can be downloaded as a PDF or e-mailed. There is no credit note without an invoice, so the settlement is always tied to the original sale. Any leftover credit is held for the customer.
• Money paid back. Customer payments are recorded against one invoice or spread across a customer's invoices. Administrators can refund or reverse a receipt, and any extra paid is held on the customer's account.
• The finance house's side. If the deal unwinds, what happens to the money the finance house paid the dealer depends on the dealer's own arrangement with that bank. Agree the figures with the bank in writing before recording anything, and keep that agreement in the file.

For how deposits and finance house payments are recorded on a normal sale, see deposits and finance house payments; for responding to a complaint that reaches the Ombudsman, read answering a Motor Industry Ombudsman complaint.

A dispute handled in writing, with the buyer kept informed and the instalments kept running, is far more likely to end in a settlement than in repossession.

For years, many South African car owners believed that servicing a new car anywhere but at the franchised dealer would void the warranty. Independent workshops lost that work for the first years of every vehicle's life, and owners paid dealer rates whether they wanted to or not.

The Competition Commission's guidelines for the automotive aftermarket changed the conversation. They open in-warranty servicing and repair to independent providers, but they also put duties on the independents that take the work. A workshop that wants in-warranty customers needs to understand both sides. This article sets out what the guidelines say, and how to keep the records and disclosures that go with the work.

What the guidelines are, and what they are not

The Competition Commission's Guidelines for Competition in the South African Automotive Aftermarket were prepared under section 79(1) of the Competition Act and are effective from 27 March 2025. The Commission states that they are not binding on the Commission itself, the Competition Tribunal or the Competition Appeal Court.

That status matters. The guidelines set out how the Commission expects the industry to behave and how it will approach competition concerns, but they are not legislation. A workshop should treat them as a strong statement of expected practice, not as a rule book that a court must follow. The Commission's aftermarket guidelines document is worth reading in full before building a marketing pitch around it.

The customer's right to choose

The guidelines say vehicle manufacturers must recognise, and not obstruct, a consumer's choice to have an in-warranty vehicle serviced, maintained and mechanically repaired by any provider, whether an approved dealer or an independent service provider.

There is a condition that independents must explain to customers. Where a consumer chooses an independent provider during the warranty period, the manufacturer has no obligation to pay for that service and maintenance work. A customer whose vehicle came with a service plan or maintenance plan funded by the manufacturer should understand that taking the car to an independent means paying for the independent's work themselves.

What the independent owes the customer

The guidelines put three specific duties on independent service providers doing in-warranty work.

The service book. The independent must record the in-warranty work in the customer's vehicle service book. A missing entry leaves the customer unable to prove the vehicle was serviced, which is exactly the kind of gap a warranty claim can founder on.

The risk disclosure. The independent must disclose clearly to consumers the risk of damage, including consequential damage, that could void certain warranty obligations. The guidelines say that damage caused by an independent provider's work or parts fitment may void certain warranty provisions, while other provisions remain severable and enforceable.

Insurance. The independent must disclose whether it holds adequate commercial insurance for the work. If something goes wrong, the customer needs to know whether there is cover behind the workshop.

The guidelines also note that a consumer harmed by a defective product can claim against any party in the supply chain under section 61 of the Consumer Protection Act. An independent that fits parts is part of that chain.

Saying it in writing, and getting it signed

A disclosure that was spoken at the counter is hard to prove later. Turn the three duties into a one-page in-warranty disclosure that the customer signs before work starts, covering:

1. That the customer has chosen your workshop over an approved dealer for this in-warranty work.
2. That the manufacturer is not obliged to pay for the work.
3. The risk that damage caused by the work or parts fitted could void certain warranty provisions, while others remain in force.
4. Whether your workshop holds commercial insurance for the work, and with whom.
5. That the work will be recorded in the vehicle's service book.

Have it reviewed by your legal adviser, keep the wording plain, and use the same version for every in-warranty job.

Technical information and training

The guidelines also deal with what independents need to do the job properly. They say manufacturers must give independent service providers technical repair information on terms no less favourable than those offered to approved dealers, and must provide training to independents' staff at a reasonable cost not exceeding that charged to approved dealers' employees. Manufacturers may require a confidentiality undertaking when they share proprietary information.

A workshop taking in-warranty work should know where to obtain the technical information for the makes it services, and keep a record of the training its technicians have completed. If the information or training is refused or priced unreasonably, keep the correspondence.

Keeping the evidence together in Achekam

Achekam does not know whether a vehicle is in warranty and does not manage service books. It can hold the evidence of what was agreed and done.

Any document, such as your in-warranty disclosure, can be sent for electronic signature with signature and initials fields placed on it, an expiry and reminders. The signed PDF and a completion certificate are filed back into Documents.

The invoice for the work can be downloaded as a PDF on the workshop's letterhead and e-mailed from the invoice. List the parts and labour clearly, including part numbers and whether each part is original or non-original.

Document Centre is a folder-based store where a business uploads files or whole folders, previews, downloads, renames, moves, tags, archives and searches them, and a new version keeps the earlier ones. Keep one folder per vehicle, named by registration or VIN, holding the signed disclosure, a photo of the stamped service book page, the job card and the invoice. If a warranty claim is later disputed, the file shows exactly what was disclosed and what was done.

For getting the customer's authorisation before charging, see repair estimates under section 15 of the CPA; for choosing parts on in-warranty vehicles, read original or non-original parts.

In-warranty work is open to independents. Keeping it depends on showing, vehicle by vehicle, that the customer was told the truth and the work was recorded.

For an independent body shop in South Africa, insurance work is the backbone of the business. Most accident repairs are paid for by insurers, and insurers send that work to the repairers on their panels. A body shop that is not on the panel sees the customer only when the customer insists, and often not even then.

Getting onto a panel used to feel like a closed door: unclear criteria, no explanation for a rejection, and the same repairers renewed year after year. The Competition Commission's aftermarket guidelines address each of those complaints. This article explains what the guidelines expect of insurers, and how an independent body shop can prepare an application that shows it meets the standard.

Published standards and published panels

The guidelines say insurers must publish the standards they use to accredit repairers, and publish a list of their panel repairers. For an applicant, that changes the starting point. Instead of guessing what the insurer wants, the body shop can obtain the published standards and work through them one by one.

Start every application by downloading the insurer's current standards and the current panel list. The list shows who you are competing with in your area; the standards show what you need to prove.

Formal reasons when an application is rejected

The guidelines also say insurers must give rejected applicants formal reasons. A rejection with reasons is useful, even if it is disappointing: it tells the body shop what to fix before it applies again. Keep every rejection letter, and keep a record of what you changed in response, so the next application can show the gap has been closed.

Five-year caps and repeated renewals

Two further provisions deal with panels that never change. The guidelines say insurers must not appoint any repairer to a panel for a period exceeding five (5) years, and must not keep renewing the same repairer where that unreasonably excludes other capable repairers.

The same limits apply to manufacturers. The guidelines bar manufacturers from appointing approved motor-body repairers for a period exceeding five (5) years, or continuously renewing them to the unreasonable exclusion of capable independent providers. They also bar exclusive arrangements within a designated geographic area.

For an independent, this means panel places should come up for review over time. Knowing when existing appointments in your area are due to be reviewed tells you when to have your application ready.

Why the guidelines carry weight without binding the courts

The guidelines were prepared under section 79(1) of the Competition Act and are effective from 27 March 2025. The Commission states that they are not binding on the Commission, the Competition Tribunal or the Competition Appeal Court. They are a statement of how the Commission expects the industry to behave, not legislation. An insurer that ignores them may attract the Commission's attention, but the guidelines themselves do not give a body shop a right to be appointed.

The Commission's guidelines for competition in the automotive aftermarket set out the panel provisions in full, together with the rules on servicing, parts and technical information.

What to have ready

Insurers' published standards differ, but most applications draw on the same evidence. A useful pack:

• Business documents. Company registration, tax and VAT details, B-BBEE certificate, and any industry association membership.
• Certificates and qualifications. Technicians' trade qualifications and manufacturer or paint-system training records. The guidelines say manufacturers must give independent providers technical repair information on terms no less favourable than approved dealers get, and training at a reasonable cost not exceeding what approved dealers' staff pay, so keep evidence of the training your team has taken.
• Equipment. A list of the major equipment, such as spray booths, jig or measuring systems and welding equipment, with photos.
• Insurance. Your commercial insurance schedule, showing cover for the work and for customers' vehicles in your care.
• Quality record. How you handle comebacks and complaints, and how repair quality is checked before a vehicle is released.
• Financial position. Recent management accounts or financial statements.

The guidelines note that damage caused by an independent's work or parts fitment may void certain warranty provisions, while others remain enforceable, and that a consumer harmed by a defective product can claim against any party in the supply chain under section 61 of the Consumer Protection Act. An insurer will want to see that you understand that exposure and are covered for it.

Figures from the books

Achekam's management accounts show an income statement for a chosen period beside the period before, and a balance sheet at period end, both added up from the business's own journals and exportable as PDF or CSV. That gives the insurer a current view of the body shop's trading and financial position. If the insurer asks for audited or reviewed financial statements, those come from your accountant.

Sending the pack and keeping a record

Document Centre is a folder-based store where a business uploads files or whole folders, previews, downloads, renames, moves, tags, archives and searches them, and a new version keeps the earlier ones. Build one folder per insurer application, holding exactly the version of each document you submitted.

A document can then be shared by e-mailing a personal link with an expiry, an optional one-time code, and downloading allowed or not, and the share can be revoked. Sending the application pack that way, rather than as a stack of attachments, gives you a record of what was shared, with whom and until when. If the insurer later says a document was missing, the folder shows what was sent.

For billing insurers and customers once you are on a panel, see insurer and excess billing; for in-warranty work outside insurance, read servicing in-warranty cars at an independent workshop.

A well-prepared application cannot promise a panel place, but it makes a rejection without good reason much harder to give.

Workshops generate paper at a remarkable rate: check-in forms, job cards, estimates, signed authorisations, parts requisitions, photos, invoices, and the occasional angry e-mail. Most of it is never looked at again. The temptation is to clear out the filing room every year or two, or to delete old scans to tidy the shared drive.

The trouble is that the one job card you need is the one you threw away. A customer who claims, years later, that a repair caused an engine failure is not interested in your filing policy. This article explains how long a claim against a South African workshop or dealer can stay alive, what the Companies Act says about records, and a sensible retention plan that follows from both.

Prescription: the three-year rule for most claims

Section 11 of the Prescription Act 68 of 1969, as published by the Department of Justice, sets out how long different debts take to prescribe. It gives thirty years for debts secured by a mortgage bond, judgment debts and tax debts; fifteen years for certain debts owed to the State from loans or the sale or lease of land; six years for debts on a bill of exchange, other negotiable instrument or notarial contract; and three years for any other debt, unless an Act of Parliament provides otherwise. You can read the Act on the Department of Justice's copy of the Prescription Act.

A customer's claim against a workshop over a repair, and a workshop's claim against a customer for an unpaid invoice, is likely to fall into that last, general category, though your lawyer is the one to confirm it. When the period starts to run, and whether something has interrupted it, depends on the facts of each case and is a question for a lawyer. For record-keeping purposes, the point is simple: a claim can surface years after the work was done.

A complaint does not stop the clock

Some workshops assume that once a customer has complained to the Motor Industry Ombudsman, time stands still until the complaint is decided. MIOSA says otherwise. It states that lodging a complaint with MIOSA or the National Consumer Commission does not interrupt prescription, and cites NCC v The Turbo Man CC, in which the National Consumer Tribunal held that it cannot entertain a matter referred to it more than three years after the cause of action.

For the workshop, the lesson cuts both ways. A customer's claim can still be pursued in other forums while a complaint runs, so the records must survive the complaint. And a workshop chasing its own unpaid invoice cannot assume that a customer's complaint has paused the time it has to sue.

The Companies Act's seven-year rule

If the workshop is a company, the Companies Act adds its own requirement. Section 24(1) of the Companies Act, 2008, as published on Acts Online, requires records that a company must keep under the Act or any other public regulation to be kept in written form, or a form convertible into written form within a reasonable time, for seven years or any longer period another applicable regulation sets. Section 24(3) requires every company to keep copies of its annual financial statements for seven years after each was issued, and its accounting records for the current financial year and the previous seven completed financial years.

Invoices are accounting records. Job cards that support an invoice are part of the evidence for it. For a company, the safest course is to keep the whole job file for at least as long as the accounting records it supports.

Tax law may set its own retention periods. Ask your accountant which applies to your business and keep records for the longest of them.

Electronic copies that still count

Few workshops want to keep years of paper. The ECT Act allows electronic retention where a law requires information to be kept. Section 16(1), as published on Acts Online, provides that keeping the information as a data message meets the requirement if it is accessible for later reference, is kept in its original format or one shown to represent it accurately, and its origin, destination and the date and time it was sent or received can be determined.

In practice that means a scan must be legible, complete and findable, and should not be edited after it is filed.

A retention plan for the workshop

Keep it simple: one job file per job, kept as a unit, destroyed only when every record in it has passed its period.

Keeping files intact in Achekam

Document Centre is a folder-based store where a business uploads files or whole folders, previews, downloads, renames, moves, tags, archives and searches them, and a new version of a file keeps the earlier ones. Every stored file gets a SHA-256 fingerprint, executable files are refused by default, and every upload passes a malware check; the check uses ClamAV only when the server is configured for it, and otherwise a built-in heuristic check runs. The fingerprint is useful evidence that a file is the one originally filed.

The books behind old invoices matter too. Months can be soft-closed, hard-closed and locked; a closed month refuses postings from every source, and reopening a hard close needs a second approver. Locking past months means the ledger that supported an invoice years ago still says what it said then.

For responding when a complaint arrives, see answering a Motor Industry Ombudsman complaint; for what the invoice itself should show, read parts on workshop invoices.

A filing room is cheaper than a claim you cannot answer. Decide the periods once, write them down, and let the plan do the clearing out.

A customer bought a car eighteen months ago with a five-year maintenance plan. Last month the car was in a serious accident, and this morning the insurer's letter arrived: the vehicle is a write-off. The customer phones the dealership with a reasonable question. What happens to the plan they paid for?

Until recently the honest answer was often "it depends", followed by a long wait. The Competition Commission's aftermarket guidelines now give a clearer starting point. This article explains what they say, why the unused part of a plan is a liability in the books of whoever carries it, and how a dealership records either a transfer to a replacement vehicle or a refund.

The guideline: transfer, or cancel and refund

The Competition Commission's aftermarket guidelines say that a maintenance or service plan must be transferred to a replacement vehicle when the insurer writes the vehicle off. Where that is not possible, the consumer must be told of, and given, the right to cancel the plan or receive a refund of its remaining value. The Commission's aftermarket guidelines set out this provision alongside the rest of the rules on plans.

Two related points from the guidelines frame the conversation. At the point of sale, approved dealers must disclose the vehicle's price separately from the prices of service plans, maintenance plans and other value-added products, which consumers may decline or buy from any licensed provider at any time. And the guidelines themselves, prepared under section 79(1) of the Competition Act and effective from 27 March 2025, are not binding on the Commission, the Competition Tribunal or the Competition Appeal Court. They set out expected conduct rather than law, but a dealer that ignores them invites a complaint.

Who carries the plan

Before anything is recorded, establish who actually owes the customer the plan. Some plans are sold and carried by the manufacturer, some by a separate plan administrator, and some by the dealership itself. If a manufacturer or administrator carries the plan, the transfer or refund is theirs to process; the dealer's job is to help the customer make the request, with the write-off letter and the plan documents. The rest of this article is for a dealership that carries the plan in its own books.

Why an unused plan is a liability

Investopedia defines deferred revenue, also called unearned revenue, as a payment received in advance for goods or services not yet delivered, shown as a liability on the balance sheet until the obligations are fulfilled. It explains that deferred revenue is a liability because, until it delivers, the company owes the customer the promised goods or services, or a refund if it cannot provide them.

A maintenance plan fits that description exactly. When the customer paid for it, the dealer took money for services it would deliver over the plan's life. Each service performed earns part of it. Whatever has not yet been earned is owed to the customer, either as services on a vehicle or, after a write-off where transfer is not possible, as money.

Working out what remains

The plan's own terms should say how its remaining value is calculated. Typical approaches are by time elapsed, by distance driven, or by the services already delivered compared with those the plan covered. Whatever the method, document the calculation:

• the plan's start date and its original price;
• the services or repairs delivered under it, with dates and job card numbers;
• the method in the plan terms, applied step by step;
• the resulting remaining value.

Give the customer the calculation in writing. A refund figure without workings invites a dispute.

Recording a refund

Where the customer chooses to cancel and take a refund, two documents carry the transaction in Achekam.

The credit note. A credit note is issued from the invoice it corrects, in full or for chosen lines, posted to the ledger, and can be downloaded as a PDF or e-mailed. There is no credit note without an invoice, so the credit note is raised against the original invoice that included the plan, for the plan line and the remaining value. Any leftover credit is held for the customer.

The money. Customer payments are recorded against one invoice or spread across a customer's invoices, and any extra is held on the customer's account. Administrators can refund or reverse a receipt. Record the money paid back to the customer, then check that the customer's account shows nothing owing either way once both the credit note and the refund are in.

If the dealership has been releasing plan revenue gradually through journals, ask your accountant to post a journal that brings the deferred revenue balance for this plan to nil, so the books do not carry a liability that no longer exists.

Moving a plan to a replacement vehicle

Where the customer buys a replacement vehicle and the plan moves across, no money changes hands and no credit note is needed. The dealer still owes the remaining services; they are simply delivered on a different car.

What changes is the record. Update the plan register to show the replacement vehicle's details, the date of transfer and the remaining value carried across. If the dealership tracks deferred plan revenue per vehicle in its ledger, post a manual journal that moves the remaining balance from the old vehicle's line to the new one. Achekam refuses a journal that does not balance or that is dated in a closed month, and a posted journal can be corrected only by a reversal, so check the figure before posting.

What to keep on file

Once the insurer's write-off letter arrives, open a file for the plan and keep:

• the write-off letter;
• the original sale invoice and plan documents;
• the remaining-value calculation, as sent to the customer;
• the customer's written choice: transfer or refund;
• the credit note and refund record, or the transfer journal and updated register entry.

For how plan prices must be shown at the point of sale, see showing service plan prices apart from the car price; for working with insurers on claims, read insurer and excess billing.

A write-off is a bad day for the customer. A dealership that resolves the plan quickly, with the workings on paper, makes it a little less bad, and earns the next sale.

The e-mail from the Motor Industry Ombudsman of South Africa lands in the general inbox on a Monday. A customer whose car was serviced months ago says the workshop damaged the turbo, the dealer refused to help, and they want the repair paid for. The dealer principal remembers the car vaguely. The service adviser who handled it has left. The job card is somewhere.

Every dealer and independent workshop will receive one of these eventually. How the business responds in the first days decides whether the complaint is resolved on the facts or on whoever tells the more convincing story. This article explains how complaints reach MIOSA, how long a business has to answer, and how to build a response file before you need one.

The ladder a customer is expected to climb

MIOSA does not expect customers to come straight to it. It tells consumers to raise a complaint first with the selling or servicing dealer, then to insist that a manufacturer's representative reviews it, then to contact the manufacturer's customer care department, and only then to approach MIOSA, keeping records at each step. MIOSA's page on submitting a motor vehicle complaint sets out each step for consumers.

For a dealer, that sequence is an opportunity. Most complaints pass through the dealership before they reach anyone else, so the business usually has the first chance to resolve them. Treat every complaint at the counter as if it might one day be read by the Ombudsman: acknowledge it in writing, investigate it, and give the customer a written answer.

For an independent workshop with no manufacturer above it, the middle rungs may not apply in the same way, but the principle holds: the customer's first complaint is to you.

How long you have

Once a complaint reaches MIOSA, MIOSA says the dealer or industry participant is given 10 days to respond. If a supplier still refuses to take part in conciliation after three attempts, the complainant is told within 22 days.

MIOSA also quotes the South African Automotive Industry Code of Conduct as requiring it to determine a dispute within 30 (thirty) days of receiving all the documentation and information it needs to make an informed decision. The clock on that decision starts when MIOSA has everything it needs, which means a business that sends its documents promptly and completely helps the matter reach a decision sooner.

Ten days is not long when the documents are scattered across a filing room, a technician's phone and a former employee's e-mail account. That is the argument for building the file as the work is done, not when the complaint arrives.

Why ignoring the Ombudsman is not an option

MIOSA cites section 82(8) of the Consumer Protection Act, which says a supplier must not, in the ordinary course of business, contravene an applicable industry code. It also cites section 108(1)(a), which makes it an offence to hinder, oppose, obstruct or unduly influence any person exercising a power or duty under the Act.

In plain terms: the industry code that MIOSA administers is not a voluntary club rule a business can opt out of when a complaint is inconvenient, and obstructing the process carries its own risk. Engage with the complaint, even when you are confident the customer is wrong.

Inspections and who pays

Some complaints turn on the physical condition of the vehicle, and MIOSA may arrange an inspection. MIOSA says its services are free to consumers except when an on-site product inspection is required, and that any inspection by an assessor may be for the complainant's account.

For the business, an inspection is a moment to have your own evidence ready: the condition of the vehicle when it was booked in, the work done, the parts fitted, and what the vehicle looked like when it left. Photos taken at check-in and at collection are often the most persuasive evidence in an inspection dispute.

Building the response file

The response file for any job should contain the same things, in the same order:

1. The check-in record: date, mileage, the customer's description of the problem, and photos.
2. The estimate and authorisations: the signed estimate, and any recorded approvals for extra work.
3. The job card: work done, technician, hours and parts fitted, with part numbers.
4. The invoice: as issued, with any credit notes.
5. Messages: every e-mail, SMS or WhatsApp exchange with the customer about the job.
6. The complaint trail: the customer's complaint, your investigation notes and your written answer.

If the file exists before the complaint, the response to MIOSA is a matter of sending it with a covering letter that addresses each of the customer's points.

Keeping and sharing the file in Achekam

Achekam's Document Centre is a folder-based store where a business uploads files or whole folders, previews, downloads, renames, moves, tags, archives and searches them, and a new version keeps the earlier ones. A folder per job, or per vehicle, holds the whole response file in one place.

Every stored file gets a SHA-256 fingerprint, executable files are refused by default, and every upload passes a malware check; the check uses ClamAV only where the server is configured for it, and a built-in heuristic check runs otherwise. The fingerprint lets you show that a job card filed at the time of the work is the same file you are now sending, which matters when a customer suggests documents were changed after the complaint.

To send the file, a document can be shared by e-mailing a personal link with an expiry, an optional one-time code, and download allowed or not, and the share can be revoked. That gives you a record of exactly what was sent to MIOSA, and when.

For the authorisations that make the strongest evidence, see repair estimates under section 15 of the CPA; for how long to keep the files, read how long a workshop should keep job cards.

A complaint answered with a complete file within the time allowed is a complaint decided on the facts. That is usually the best outcome a business can hope for.

A customer brings a two-year-old car to an independent workshop for new brake pads. The original part from the franchised dealer costs noticeably more than a reputable pattern brand. The customer asks the obvious question: will the cheaper part affect my warranty? And the workshop owner has a question of their own: if I want the original part, will the dealer even sell it to me?

The Competition Commission's aftermarket guidelines answer both questions, with some important limits. This article sets out what they say about original and non-original parts, which safety parts carry their own regulation, and how a workshop can keep records that trace every part it fits back to its supplier.

Original, non-original, and what is excluded

The guidelines say consumers can fit original or non-original spare parts during the warranty period at a provider of their choice. In the guidelines, non-original parts exclude counterfeit, grey and illegally sourced parts. A reputable pattern part from an established manufacturer is non-original; a fake carrying a manufacturer's logo, or a part brought in outside legitimate channels, is not covered by that freedom at all.

For a workshop, the exclusion is as important as the permission. Fitting a counterfeit part is not exercising the customer's choice; it is a risk to the customer and to the business. Knowing where every part came from is the only defence.

The Commission's guidelines for competition in the automotive aftermarket set out the parts provisions in full. They were prepared under section 79(1) of the Competition Act, are effective from 27 March 2025, and are not binding on the Commission, the Competition Tribunal or the Competition Appeal Court.

Buying original parts from the manufacturer's network

Independent workshops have long complained that original parts were hard to get. The guidelines say manufacturers and approved dealers must make original spare parts available to independent providers who need them for repairs, and that manufacturers may not restrict an independent service provider's ability to buy original parts needed for service, maintenance and repair work.

There is a limit on what the workshop may do with them. Manufacturers may prohibit the independent from on-selling those parts to third parties. Buying original parts to fit to customers' vehicles is protected; buying them to resell over the counter to other workshops or the public may not be.

Prices and the security-system exception

The guidelines also say manufacturers may not set minimum retail prices for spare parts. That leaves workshops and dealers free to price parts competitively.

One category is treated differently. Conditional sale of original parts is reserved for items linked to the vehicle's security system, such as keys, immobilisers and related components. A workshop asking for these may face conditions the manufacturer would not impose on, say, a filter or a headlamp.

Safety parts with their own regulator

The Competition Commission notes that a motor vehicle has approximately between 30,000 and 60,000 parts and components, and that the NRCS regulates the safety of lights, brakes, brake fluids and seals. The freedom to choose non-original parts does not override safety regulation. For those categories, a workshop should check that the non-original part it fits meets the applicable requirements, and keep evidence of where it came from.

When a fitted part causes damage

Freedom of choice comes with consequences. The guidelines say damage caused by an independent provider's work or parts fitment may void certain warranty provisions, while other provisions remain severable and enforceable. A consumer harmed by a defective product can claim against any party in the supply chain under section 61 of the Consumer Protection Act.

Two practical points follow. First, tell the customer, in writing, which parts you are fitting and whether they are original or non-original, so the choice is genuinely theirs. Second, be able to name the supplier of every part, so that if a part fails and causes damage, the claim can move up the supply chain to where it belongs.

Recording supplier and cost for every part

Traceability starts with a clean supplier list. Achekam keeps one supplier list per business, with duplicate checks by name or VAT number, and quotations, orders and bills pick suppliers from it. A pattern part bought from "Auto Spares" and from "Auto Spares (Pty) Ltd" should not end up looking like two different sources.

Supplier bills are recorded line by line with VAT. A bill without a purchase order waits for approval before it posts, and it can be paid in full or in parts from a chosen bank account. Record the part number and description on each bill line rather than a single total, so that a part fitted to a customer's car can be matched to the bill it came on.

For parts held in stock, Achekam's Item Master lists and creates products with an SKU, name, category, selling and cost price, opening quantity and VAT treatment; it needs the Point of Sale, Warehousing or Wholesale add-on. Use separate SKUs for original and non-original versions of the same part, with the brand in the name, so the job card and the invoice show exactly which was fitted.

A short checklist for the parts counter:

• Every supplier on the single supplier list, with full legal name and VAT number.
• Every purchase recorded line by line, with part numbers.
• Original and non-original versions held under different SKUs.
• No parts from sources you cannot name.
• The customer told in writing which kind of part is being fitted.

For setting up part numbers and barcodes, see parts stock, SKUs and barcodes; for in-warranty work more broadly, read servicing in-warranty cars at an independent workshop.

The customer's freedom to choose the part is real. So is the workshop's responsibility to know exactly what it fitted, and from whom.

A buyer agrees a price for a new car and, an hour later in the finance office, signs for a monthly instalment that includes a service plan, a tyre and rim cover, scratch and dent insurance and a tracking device. The deal is done. Months later the buyer looks at the paperwork and cannot tell what the car cost and what the extras cost, or whether any of them were optional.

South Africa's Competition Commission has addressed exactly this bundling in its aftermarket guidelines. Approved dealers are now expected to separate the vehicle from the add-ons at the point of sale, and to tell buyers that the add-ons can be declined or bought elsewhere. This article explains what the guidelines require, and how to set up invoices so the split is visible on the document the buyer receives.

The point-of-sale rule

The Competition Commission's aftermarket guidelines require approved dealers, at the point of sale, to disclose the purchase price of the vehicle separately from the prices of service plans, maintenance plans and other value-added products.

The aim is simple: the buyer should be able to see what the car costs on its own, and what each extra adds. A single figure that blends the vehicle with three or four products does not allow that comparison.

The guidelines were prepared under section 79(1) of the Competition Act and are effective from 27 March 2025. The Commission states that they are not binding on the Commission, the Competition Tribunal or the Competition Appeal Court; they describe the conduct the Commission expects rather than creating legislation. The full text is in the Commission's guidelines for competition in the automotive aftermarket.

Optional, and available elsewhere

The same provision says consumers may decline service plans, maintenance plans and other value-added products, or buy them from any licensed provider at any time. That changes the sales conversation. A plan is something the dealer offers, not something the buyer must take to get the car.

A practical way to make this clear is a short written statement in the deal pack, signed by the buyer, listing each add-on offered, its price, and the fact that it is optional and available from other licensed providers. That statement protects the dealer as much as the buyer if the sale is later questioned.

Commissions and finance providers

The guidelines go further than prices. They require approved dealers, at the point of sale, to disclose dealer commissions and other commissions arising from commercial arrangements with the manufacturer and third parties, to the extent that this is not competitively sensitive information.

They also put a duty on finance providers: to give details of the inclusions and exclusions in maintenance and service plans, including the average price of each service interval. A dealer whose finance office arranges the finance should make sure that information reaches the buyer, because the buyer will associate any gap with the dealership, not the bank.

A related provision deals with what happens later: if the insurer writes the vehicle off, the plan must be transferred to a replacement vehicle or the consumer told of the right to cancel or be refunded the remaining value. That is easier to handle when the plan's price was recorded separately in the first place.

One invoice line per product

The easiest way to show the split is on the invoice itself. In Achekam a business creates customer invoices as drafts it can change or delete, and issuing one takes the next number in its sequence and posts it to the ledger as debtors, sales and output VAT. Build the vehicle sale invoice with one line per item:

The issued invoice can be downloaded as a PDF on the dealer's letterhead and e-mailed from the invoice, and a failed send is reported as not sent. The buyer receives a document that shows the split the guidelines call for.

Enter the dealership's VAT registration number in Settings under Firm Profile. Documents made by the server print it, and are titled Tax Invoice only when a VAT number is set.

Why the revenue still lands in one account

There is a limitation to plan around. In Achekam today, all invoice revenue posts to one account, Professional Services Revenue (4100), even for a business that sells goods, and an invoice line cannot name another sales account. The invoice the buyer sees is split line by line; the ledger is not.

Until that changes, read the split from the invoices rather than from the revenue account. At month end, list the plan and add-on lines from the month's vehicle invoices, total them by product, and post a manual journal moving those amounts from account 4100 to the accounts where you want to see them, such as a separate revenue account or, for a plan you deliver over time, a deferred revenue liability. Achekam refuses a journal that does not balance or that is dated in a closed month, so post it before closing the month.

A checklist for the finance office

• Vehicle price shown separately from every add-on, on the offer and the invoice.
• Each add-on on its own invoice line, with its price.
• A signed statement that add-ons are optional and available from other licensed providers.
• Commissions disclosed as the guidelines require, unless competitively sensitive.
• The finance provider's plan details, including inclusions, exclusions and the average price per service interval, passed to the buyer.

For handling plans after a write-off, see maintenance plans when the insurer writes a car off; for deposits and finance settlements, read deposits and finance house payments.

A buyer who can see what each part of the deal costs is a buyer who is less likely to feel cheated by it later.

When a customer pays in your shop, they hold the card, and the terminal reads the chip. When they pay from a link on their phone at midnight, nobody sees the card at all. That gap is where most online card fraud lives, and it is the gap 3-D Secure was built to close.

If you send invoices with a pay link, or take card payments through a gateway such as Paystack, Flutterwave or Stripe, your customers will meet 3-D Secure sooner or later: a one-time PIN by SMS, a prompt in their banking app, or sometimes nothing visible at all. Knowing what is happening behind that screen helps you answer the customer who rings to ask why their bank "stopped" the payment.

The problem it solves: card-not-present fraud

A payment where the card is not physically presented to the merchant is called card-not-present. Someone who has stolen card numbers can try them on any website without holding the plastic.

EMVCo, the body that maintains the specification, says card issuers and merchants use EMV 3-D Secure (3DS) to authenticate consumers and to safeguard against card-not-present fraud. In plain terms, 3DS gives the bank that issued the card a chance to ask, "Is this really our customer?" before the payment goes through.

What the customer's bank gets to see

The useful part of 3DS is the information it carries. EMVCo explains that EMV 3DS exchanges data between the merchant and the card issuer, including details about the transaction, the payment method and the device being used, so the issuer can authenticate the consumer and approve the transaction.

Picture a Nairobi customer settling a shilling invoice for a monthly service. The bank sees the amount, the merchant, the card and the phone the payment comes from. If that phone and that pattern look like the customer's usual behaviour, the bank may let the payment through quietly. If something looks wrong, such as a new device or an odd amount, it may step in and ask the customer to prove who they are.

Friction, and why customers abandon payments

Every extra step at checkout is a chance for a customer to give up. A one-time PIN that arrives late, a banking app that will not open, or a screen the customer does not recognise can each end a sale.

EMVCo addresses this directly. It says the data exchanged through EMV 3DS lets issuers identify and prevent fraudulent transactions without adding unnecessary friction, which it notes often leads to abandoned purchases. EMVCo also publishes EMV 3DS UI/UX design guidelines to help issuers, merchants and solution providers improve the authentication experience for online shoppers.

What this means for you:

• Expect some customers to be challenged and others not, even for similar amounts.
• Tell customers in your invoice e-mail that their bank may ask them to confirm the payment.
• When a customer says the payment "failed", ask whether they received a prompt from their bank before assuming the link is broken.
• Keep your business name recognisable on the pay page, so a customer who is challenged knows who they are paying.

Who decides when 3DS is asked for

It is tempting to think the business switches 3DS on or off. In practice, the decision is shared. Writing about subscription card payments, Stripe states that whether a payment needs 3D Secure authentication depends on the merchant's fraud rules and on the card's issuing bank.

So there are at least two voices: the fraud settings your payment provider applies to your account, and the customer's bank, which may require authentication regardless. Your gateway's own documentation and dashboard are the place to see what rules apply to your account; ask your provider if anything is unclear.

A short table of who does what:

Pay links and the gateways Achekam connects to

In Achekam, a business can create a payment link for an issued customer invoice, copy it or e-mail it with the invoice, and the customer pays on a public page that shows the business's name and branding. A link cannot be made for a draft or voided invoice.

The link works through the business's own gateway. A workspace administrator enters the gateway credentials in Settings under Payment Gateways & Checkout and can test the connection with a real call to the gateway. Among the options:

• Paystack, for invoices in NGN, KES, GHS, ZAR or USD, with each payment confirmed with Paystack before it is recorded.
• Flutterwave, for invoices in ZAR, NGN, KES, GHS or USD, with each payment re-verified with Flutterwave before it is recorded.
• Stripe Checkout, in ZAR, USD, EUR or GBP, with webhooks accepted only when their signature is valid and recent.

The authentication step itself belongs to the gateway and the customer's bank. What Achekam adds is what happens after the money moves: a verified gateway payment is recorded as a receipt against the invoice, debiting that gateway's clearing account and crediting trade receivables, and the invoice shows as paid or part-paid. The invoice, the receipt and the ledger entry stay together, so nobody has to retype the payment.

Achekam never charges a customer automatically. There are no saved cards or debit orders, so every card payment is one the customer starts and completes on the pay page. For the wider card-security picture, see our guide to PCI DSS levels and what a small merchant validates.

When authentication is not enough

3DS makes it harder for a stranger to use a stolen card. It does not stop a genuine customer from disputing a charge later because the goods never arrived or the service was not what they expected. That is a separate process with its own deadlines, covered in what happens when a customer disputes a card payment.

EMVCo's own overview of EMV 3-D Secure explains how issuers and merchants use it against card-not-present fraud and links to the design guidelines. Read it once, then ask your gateway provider how 3DS is applied to your account, and put a line about bank confirmation in the e-mail that carries your pay links.

Every business that sells on credit ends up with a few customers who stop paying. One has gone quiet for months. Another is in a dispute you may lose. A third has closed its doors. The question at month-end or year-end is not only "will we get this money?" but "what do the books say in the meantime?"

There are two different tools for this, and they are often confused. An allowance says, "We may not collect this, so we will not count all of it as an asset." A write-off says, "This is gone." They are recorded differently, they affect profit at different times, and only one of them stops you chasing the customer.

Doubtful is not the same as bad

Investopedia defines a bad debt as an amount owed by a customer that is unlikely to be collected, resulting in a financial loss. In practice, debts move through stages:

• Current: within terms, nothing to worry about.
• Overdue: late, but the customer is still talking to you.
• Doubtful: there is real reason to think part or all of it will not be paid, but you have not given up.
• Bad: you have done what you reasonably can, and the debt will not be recovered.

The allowance belongs to the doubtful stage. The write-off belongs to the bad stage.

The allowance: still chasing, but honest about the asset

ACCA explains that an allowance for receivables presents trade receivables at a realistic value without writing the debt off, so the balance stays on the customer's account and collection continues. That is the key point for an owner: making an allowance does not tell the customer anything, close their account or forgive the debt. It changes what your balance sheet claims you are owed.

Investopedia describes how it is recorded: debit bad debt expense, credit a contra-asset account called the allowance for doubtful accounts. On the balance sheet, the allowance is netted against total receivables so that only the amount you expect to collect is shown.

Only the movement hits profit

ACCA stresses that only the increase or decrease in the allowance goes to the statement of profit or loss each year. A worked example in words:

1. At the end of the first year, you review the aged debtors and set up an allowance. The whole allowance is charged to profit or loss, because it went from nothing to something.
2. At the end of the second year, you review again. If the allowance needs to be larger, only the increase is charged. If it can be smaller, because some doubtful customers paid, the decrease is a credit to profit or loss.
3. The allowance account carries forward from year to year. You top it up or release part of it; you do not start again from nothing.

This is why an owner sometimes sees "bad debts" as a negative cost in a good year: the allowance came down.

Writing off: when the money is gone

A write-off removes the debt from the customer's account. The usual entry, where an allowance already exists for that customer, is to debit the allowance and credit trade receivables. Where no allowance was made, the debit goes to bad debt expense. Either way, the customer's balance is cleared and the debt no longer appears in your debtors.

Because a write-off ends collection in the books, it deserves a second pair of eyes. A short checklist before approving one:

• Has the customer received statements and reminders, and is there a record of them?
• Is the debt older than your policy's limit, or is there a specific event, such as the business closing?
• Is any part of it disputed, and should that part be a credit note instead?
• Who approved the write-off, and is that recorded with the reason?

If money later arrives from a debt you wrote off, record it as income in the period it arrives, or reinstate the debt and receipt it, as your accountant prefers. Do not leave it unexplained in the bank.

The direct write-off method

Some small businesses skip the allowance and simply write debts off when they are found to be uncollectible. Investopedia explains, in a US accounting and tax context, that this direct write-off method records the exact amount lost but fails to follow the matching principle of accrual accounting: the loss lands in a later period than the sale that caused it.

That is why accountants generally prefer the allowance. A business that made large credit sales in one year, some of which will never be paid, shows a truer profit for that year if it recognises the likely loss then, not two years later. How each method is treated for income tax differs between South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya, so the tax side is one for your accountant.

Doing both in Achekam

Achekam keeps your receivables aged into 0-30, 31-60, 61-90, 91-120 and over 120 days, with overdue totals. That ageing is the starting point for an allowance: the older bands are where doubtful debts usually sit.

For the allowance itself, use a manual journal. Each business has its own chart of accounts, and accounts can be added, so you can create an allowance account alongside trade receivables and a bad debts expense account. An unbalanced journal, or one dated in a closed month, is refused, and a posted journal is corrected only by a reversal, so the history of each year's adjustment stays visible.

For a debt that is truly gone, Achekam's write-off works on the invoice itself: an unpaid debt can be written off once a partner approves. Separately, an administrator can void an issued invoice that has no payments or credits, which reverses its journal. A void is for an invoice that should never have been issued; a write-off is for a real sale the customer will not pay for. Do not use one in place of the other.

The industry articles show how this plays out in practice: writing off irrecoverable legal fees and deciding on school fee arrears from the ageing.

Your next step

Investopedia's article on bad debt and how it is estimated and written off sets out the allowance and direct write-off methods side by side. Before your next month-end, pull the aged debtors, mark which balances are doubtful and which are truly bad, and agree with your accountant how the allowance will be worked out each year, so the method stays the same from one year to the next.

You sell something for a round amount, the customer taps a card, and a day or two later a smaller amount lands in your bank account. The missing slice is the cost of accepting the card, and most owners only ever see it as a single deduction. Yet that deduction is built from several parts, and the largest of them usually goes to a bank you have never dealt with: the one that issued your customer's card.

That part is called interchange. Understanding it will not make it disappear, but it explains why one card payment costs you more than another, and it shapes how you should record card income in your books.

What interchange is

Investopedia defines an interchange fee as a fee a merchant pays when a customer pays by credit or debit card. It is set by the card payment networks, such as Mastercard and Visa, and it is usually calculated as a percentage of the transaction plus a fixed fee.

Two things in that definition matter for a business owner. First, you do not negotiate interchange directly; the networks set it. Second, because it has a percentage element and a fixed element, small payments can be proportionally more expensive than large ones, since the fixed part is the same whatever the amount.

Investopedia's explanation is written from a largely American point of view, and the figures it discusses are American ones. The structure is what carries over. For the actual rates on your account in South Africa, Nigeria or Kenya, the source is your own bank's or payment provider's fee schedule.

Where the money goes

Investopedia explains the flow like this: the merchant's acquiring bank, meaning the bank or provider that settles card payments to you, passes the fee to the card network, and most of it lands with the card issuer while a small percentage goes back to the network.

Your statement may show one combined deduction or several lines. Either way, interchange is one ingredient inside it.

Why some card payments cost more

Investopedia lists the factors that affect interchange: the type of card (debit or credit), the payment method (such as chip, PIN or tap-and-pay), the type of transaction (online or in person) and the merchant's industry. Two of these explain most of the variation an ordinary business sees.

Credit against debit

Investopedia states that credit cards generally carry higher interchange than debit cards, and that higher-end cash-back and travel rewards cards charge high fees. When a customer pays with a premium rewards card, part of what funds their rewards comes out of your fee.

Online against in person

Investopedia notes that an online interchange fee might be higher than an in-person one, because internet transactions are deemed to carry more security risk. The same customer paying the same invoice may cost you more through a pay link than through a terminal at your counter.

None of this means you should turn customers away. It means your card costs will move with your sales mix, and a month with more online or premium-card sales may show higher fees without anything going wrong.

Seeing the fees in what you are paid

The fee rarely arrives as a separate invoice. It shows up as the gap between what customers paid and what was settled to you. For a business, that gap appears in two places:

• Card terminal settlements. The bank's terminal settles a batch of card sales into your account, usually net of its charges, and the bank statement or merchant statement shows the deduction.
• Gateway payouts. An online gateway collects many payments and pays out a total after its fees, with a payout report that lists what was deducted.

The common mistake is to record only the net amount as sales. That understates revenue and hides the cost of accepting cards, which is a real expense you want to see every month.

Recording card fees in Achekam

Achekam separates the sale from the settlement, which is what makes the fee visible.

At the till, a card payment is recorded by the cashier from the bank terminal's slip, because the till is not connected to any card machine. Every till sale that reaches the server posts a balanced journal in the same step, with each payment method to its own account; card and QR payments go to account 1060. Revenue is recorded at the full sale amount.

When the terminal settlement reaches your bank, you import the statement (as PDF, CSV, Excel, OFX, QIF, MT940 or CAMT.053), and bank lines are matched by suggestion, with a person accepting each match. A fee line not yet in the books becomes a suggested journal that a person approves, so the bank charge lands in an expense account rather than being netted against sales.

For online gateways, payouts from each gateway, including M-Pesa, are recorded against that gateway's clearing account with its fees, either by hand or from Paystack's and Flutterwave's own payout lists. The clearing account then shows the gross payments in, the fees out and the payout to the bank, and should come back to nothing once a payout is fully recorded.

For worked examples by industry, see reconciling card settlements in retail and gateway payouts and fees for travel businesses.

What to do with this

Investopedia's article on what interchange fees are and who receives them explains the mechanics in more depth. Then ask your bank or gateway for its current fee schedule, compare it with what your last three months of settlements actually show, and keep card fees in their own expense account so the cost of taking cards is visible on every set of management accounts.

Ask two owners how their month went and you may get two different kinds of answer. One looks at the bank balance: more came in than went out, so it was a good month. The other looks at the invoices sent and the bills received: the work done was worth more than it cost, so it was a good month. Both are describing something real. They are simply keeping score on different bases.

Which basis your books use decides when a sale counts as a sale and when a cost counts as a cost. It changes the profit figure in any given month, sometimes by a lot, and it changes what a banker or investor will make of your figures.

When cash moves versus when it is earned

Investopedia explains the cash method simply: it recognises transactions only when there is an exchange of cash. A sale is income on the day the customer pays. A supplier's bill is an expense on the day you pay it.

Accrual accounting, as Investopedia defines it, matches revenue and expenses to the period in which they are incurred rather than when cash changes hands. Under accrual, a company records revenue before receiving payment for goods or services sold, and records expenses as they are incurred.

A worked example in words. A Lagos printing business finishes a large brochure job at the end of March and invoices it on the last day of the month. The client pays at the end of April. The paper for the job was bought on credit in March and paid for in May.

• Cash basis: March shows nothing for the job. April shows the full sale as income. May shows the paper as a cost. The job looks wildly profitable in April and loss-making in May.
• Accrual basis: March shows the sale and the paper cost together, because that is when the work was done and the cost incurred. April and May show only the money moving in and out, which changes what is owed, not the profit.

Why accrual gives the truer picture

Investopedia notes that the accrual method gives a more accurate picture of a company's condition. The printing example shows why: under accrual, the profit on the job sits in the month the job was done, beside the costs that produced it. Under cash, the timing of payments drives the result.

Accrual also tells you things cash cannot:

• how much customers owe you, and how old those debts are;
• how much you owe suppliers, so a healthy bank balance does not hide a pile of unpaid bills;
• whether a month's work was actually profitable, regardless of when customers settled.

The price, Investopedia adds, is that accrual is more complex and so more expensive to implement, which is why many small businesses use cash accounting. That trade-off was real when every entry was handwritten. It matters less when the software makes the accrual entries as part of normal invoicing.

The modified cash basis

Investopedia lists three accounting methods: the cash basis, the accrual basis and a hybrid called the modified cash basis. A hybrid typically keeps day-to-day income and expenses on a cash footing while treating longer-lived items, such as equipment, more like accrual, so a large purchase is spread over the years it is used.

It can be a reasonable stepping stone for a very small business, but it shares the main weakness of the cash basis: you still do not see what customers owe you or what you owe suppliers in the figures.

Which basis you may use for tax, and whether financial statements for lenders or shareholders must be on accrual, depends on your country and your circumstances. Settle that question with your accountant before you choose.

How Achekam records invoices and bills

Achekam keeps each business's books in its own double-entry ledger, set up with a standard chart of accounts when the books first open. The way it records sales and purchases puts you on the accrual basis by default:

• Customer invoices. You draft an invoice, change or delete it while it is a draft, and issuing it takes the next number in its sequence and posts it to the ledger as debtors, sales and output VAT. The sale is income on the day the invoice is issued, not the day it is paid.
• Customer payments. A payment is recorded against one invoice or spread across a customer's invoices. A part payment leaves the invoice part-paid, and any extra is held on the customer's account. The receipt reduces what the customer owes; it does not create a second sale.
• Supplier bills. You record supplier bills line by line with VAT. A bill without a purchase order waits for approval before it posts. A bill can then be paid in full or in parts from a chosen bank account.

Because invoices, receipts and bills all post straight to the same ledger, nobody has to rebuild the accruals at month-end from a spreadsheet of who owes what.

What changes for the owner reading the figures

Achekam's management accounts show an income statement for a chosen period beside the period before, and a balance sheet at period end, both added up from the business's own journals. On the accrual basis, read them like this:

1. Profit is not cash. A strong month on the income statement can coexist with a thin bank balance if customers have not paid yet. See why a business can show profit but have no cash.
2. The balance sheet carries the timing. Trade receivables show sales not yet collected; trade payables show costs not yet paid.
3. Money received before you deliver is not income yet. Accrual has a mirror image: a deposit for work you have not done is owed back to the customer until you do it, covered in why money received in advance is a liability.

Investopedia's article on accrual accounting and how it differs from the cash method has more on the two methods. If your books have been kept on cash until now, ask your accountant to bring in the unpaid invoices and bills at the date you switch, so the first accrual month starts from the right place.

The e-mail from your payment provider usually arrives without warning. A customer who paid by card weeks ago has gone to their bank and said the payment should not stand. The money has already left your gateway balance, a fee has been added, and there is a deadline in the message that is closer than you would like.

Most businesses meet a dispute rarely enough that they have no routine for it, which is exactly why they lose ones they could have won. This article lays out the sequence from the customer's call to their bank through to the final decision, the time limits that apply at each stage, and how to keep your books straight while it runs.

What a dispute actually is

Visa defines a dispute as the reversal of the value, or part of the value, of a transaction by the card issuer to the acquirer and, usually, by the merchant bank to the merchant. Put plainly: the customer's bank takes the money back from your bank or provider, and your provider takes it back from you.

The customer does not ask you first. They ask their bank, which can start the process without your agreement. "Chargeback" is the common name for the formal stage of this process.

Common reasons include a charge the cardholder does not recognise, goods that never arrived, a service that was cancelled, or a belief that they were charged twice. Some are genuine fraud; many are misunderstandings that a clear receipt could have prevented.

How long customers have to raise one

Stripe explains that card networks typically allow cardholders to start a dispute within 120 days of the original payment. There is an important twist for businesses that sell ahead of time: when a customer pays for a future event or service, Stripe says the dispute window generally starts on the event date, not the payment date.

A conference organiser who sells tickets months ahead, a travel agency taking a deposit for a December trip, or a school collecting next term's fees in advance can therefore face disputes long after the money arrived. Our article on card disputes after the event date looks at that case in detail.

The timeline once a dispute opens

Stripe sets out the typical stages and their windows. Response windows vary by card network, so treat these as the usual range, not a promise:

Stripe adds that while a dispute is open, a business cannot issue a refund outside the dispute process, and each dispute raises the business's dispute rate with that card network. If you have already decided to refund, do it before a dispute is opened, not after.

Why silence loses

The response window is the one part of the timeline you control, and it is short. Stripe warns that failing to respond to a dispute inquiry can signal to the issuer that you implicitly accept the claim, and can escalate it to a formal chargeback that is probably unwinnable.

A practical evidence checklist to have ready for any card sale:

• the invoice or receipt, showing what was sold and when;
• proof of delivery, collection or service performed;
• the customer's acceptance of your terms, including cancellation and refund terms;
• correspondence with the customer, especially anything acknowledging receipt;
• for online payments, the pay link and the date it was used.

A note for Nigerian card payments

Stripe states that, due to local regulations, disputes submitted for Nigerian payment methods cannot be challenged by the business. That statement is about payments processed through Stripe; if you take naira payments through another provider, ask that provider how disputes on those payments are handled.

The money held while it runs

Stripe states that when a dispute is opened, the disputed amount plus a dispute fee is debited from the business's balance, and the disputed funds are held for the entire duration of the dispute. You do not get to keep the money while you argue the case; you argue to get it back.

For a small business, that matters for cash planning. Several disputes in one month can take a noticeable bite out of what you expected to be paid, for up to the whole lifecycle Stripe describes.

The paid invoice in your books while the dispute is open

In Achekam, a verified gateway payment is recorded as a receipt against the invoice, debiting that gateway's clearing account and crediting trade receivables, and the invoice shows as paid or part-paid. That was correct on the day the customer paid.

A dispute is fought in the payment provider's own dashboard, not in your accounting system. The same is true of refunds of online invoice payments: Achekam does not send them through the gateway; they are made in the gateway's own dashboard and recorded by a person.

So when a dispute opens, someone needs to record its effect. A manual journal moves the debited amount out of the gateway's clearing account, and the dispute fee goes to an expense account. Because Achekam refuses an unbalanced journal or one dated in a closed month, and a posted journal is corrected only by a reversal, the entries stay traceable when the outcome arrives. The detailed entries, including what to do when you win or lose, are in recording a chargeback and its fee in the books.

A routine for the next one

Pick one person to watch for dispute notices from each gateway, agree that every notice is answered well inside the window, and keep the evidence for each sale where that person can find it in minutes. Stripe's guide to how disputes work, stage by stage covers inquiries, chargebacks, evidence deadlines and how funds and fees move; read it alongside your own provider's terms, because the windows differ between card networks.

Owners often assume that once the books are "in the system", the system is keeping them honest. Some of that is true. Good accounting software refuses entries that cannot be right, stops people changing months that are finished, and makes sure two documents never share a number. But software cannot tell whether a supplier is real, whether a discount was justified, or whether the person approving a payment actually read it.

Knowing where that line falls tells you what to test, what to trust and where a person still has to look. This article sorts the controls a small business can expect its software to enforce from the ones that stay with its people.

Two kinds of IT control

ACCA draws a useful distinction. General IT controls help ensure systems operate as intended and produce reliable output: who can sign in, how changes are made, how data is protected. Application controls are automated and designed to ensure complete and accurate recording of data from input to output: the checks built into each screen and each posting.

Investopedia defines internal controls more broadly as the processes and procedures a company uses to keep records accurate, prevent fraud and improve efficiency. Software is one part of that system, not the whole of it.

For a small business, the practical question is narrower: when someone types something into the books, what will the software refuse?

Checks on what goes in

These are the application controls worth expecting from any accounting system, and how Achekam applies them.

Every journal must balance

ACCA lists arithmetic and accounting controls, such as reconciliations and trial balances, among the common control procedures. The most basic is that debits equal credits. In Achekam, an unbalanced journal is refused outright, rather than being saved with a warning.

Finished months stay finished

In Achekam, months can be soft-closed, hard-closed and locked. A closed month refuses postings from every source, not just manual journals, and reopening a hard close needs a second approver. Before closing, the screen checks that the ledger balances and that no posting suggestions, unposted bills or unmatched bank lines are waiting.

Corrections leave a trail

A posted journal in Achekam is corrected only by a reversal. Nobody can quietly edit last month's entry; the original and its correction both stay in the ledger.

Numbers that cannot collide

Issuing a customer invoice takes the next number in its sequence and posts it to the ledger. At the till, several tills can run at once, and the server hands out receipt numbers so two tills never share one. On the purchasing side, a supplier's invoice number stops a matched supplier invoice being posted twice.

Imports that must add up

When a bank statement is imported, Achekam checks that the opening balance plus the movements equals the closing balance. A statement with a missing page fails the check, instead of leaving a silent gap in the bank account.

Who can get in

General IT controls start with access. A business on Achekam can set its own IP allowlist and two-factor sign-in rules, and they bind outsiders too: a member of an accounting firm opening the business's books must meet that business's own allowlist and two-factor rules. The firm's people do not get a side door.

Access controls are only as good as their upkeep. Remove people who have left, review who holds administrator rights, and require two-factor sign-in for anyone who can approve payments. Our article on two-factor sign-in goes further.

What software cannot do

Investopedia gives authorisation of invoices, verification of expenses and limiting physical access to cash, inventory and equipment as examples of preventative controls. Software can route an invoice to an approver. It cannot make the approver read it.

These stay with people:

• Judgement. Whether an expense was for the business, whether a price was fair, whether a customer deserves credit.
• Review. Reading the management accounts, questioning variances, and following up what looks odd. ACCA lists management controls such as variance analysis for this reason.
• Matching that needs a decision. In Achekam, bank lines are matched by suggestion, but a person accepts each match, and a reconciliation completes only when nothing is left unexplained.
• Physical controls. Locking the cash box and the stock room is outside any ledger.
• Segregation of duties in a small team. Software can enforce it where it is built in. In Achekam's payroll, for example, a pay run is approved by someone other than the person who prepared it, and nobody can approve a run that pays themselves. But if one person holds every role, no system can split them.

A checklist for testing your own set-up

Run these tests once, on a quiet afternoon, and write down what happened:

1. Try to post a journal that does not balance. It should be refused.
2. Try to post a journal into a month you have closed. It should be refused.
3. Try to change a posted journal. You should only be able to reverse it.
4. Check that invoice numbers run in sequence with no gaps you cannot explain.
5. Try to enter the same supplier invoice number twice for the same supplier.
6. Sign in from an address outside your allowlist, if you use one. Access should be refused.
7. List every user with administrator or approval rights. Each one should be someone who needs it.
8. Pick three payments from last month and check who approved each, and whether that person could also have created it.

If a test passes, you can rely on the software for that control. If it fails, or if the honest answer to number eight is "the same person", you have found a gap to close with a person, a rule or a change of roles. For a framework that ties these pieces together, see the COSO framework for a small business.

Where to read more

ACCA's article on internal controls, the control environment and segregation of duties explains general and application controls and lists the common control procedures. Use it to decide which of the people-dependent controls above your business needs most, and give each one a named owner.

"COSO" turns up in audit reports, bank covenants and board packs, usually without explanation. For the owner of a ten-person business in Durban, Abuja or Mombasa, it can sound like something meant for listed companies with internal audit departments. It is, partly. But the thinking behind it scales down well, and a small business that borrows its structure ends up with fewer surprises in its books.

This article explains what the framework is, which version is current, and how to turn it into a short list an owner can actually run.

What COSO is, and which version applies

COSO is the Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission. Its Internal Control—Integrated Framework was first issued in 1992 and refreshed in 2013. COSO states that on December 15, 2014 the original 1992 framework was superseded by the 2013 version. If anyone hands you material built on the older one, it is out of date.

COSO says the framework was developed as guidance to help improve confidence in all types of data and information. It also makes a point small businesses should hear: internal controls have value beyond compliance and external reporting. COSO states that effective internal controls can help an organisation articulate its purpose, set its objectives and strategy, and grow on a sustained basis with confidence and integrity in its information. In other words, it is about running the business well, not only about satisfying auditors.

The parts of a control system in plain terms

COSO delineates five components of effective internal control, and states that effective monitoring is one of them. Investopedia, describing internal control systems more generally, lists their parts as a control environment, risk assessment, monitoring, information and communication, control activities, compliance with laws and regulations, separation of duties and physical controls.

Translated for an owner-managed business:

Reasonable assurance, not perfection

ACCA explains that no internal control system is perfect, so the purpose of any control system should be to provide reasonable assurance that the organisation can meet its objectives. ACCA attributes this view to the Turnbull Report, first published in 1999.

For a small business, that is liberating. You are not trying to make fraud or error impossible. You are trying to make it unlikely, and to make sure that if it happens, you find out soon. A control that costs more than the risk it covers is a bad control, however correct it looks on paper.

Scaling it down: a short list for an owner-managed business

A workable version for a business with a handful of staff fits on one page:

• Tone. Write down the few rules that matter (who may approve payments, who may give discounts, who may take stock off-site) and follow them yourself.
• Risks. Once a year, list the five places you would steal from if you worked for yourself. Those are where your controls go.
• Two people on every payment. One prepares, another approves. If only the owner can approve, the owner approves.
• Bank reconciled every month. Every line explained, not just the total.
• Months closed. Once the month is reviewed, nobody posts into it without the owner knowing.
• Bank details checked. Any new or changed supplier or employee bank account is confirmed by someone other than the person who entered it.
• Owner review. The owner reads the management accounts monthly and asks about anything unexpected.

Controls Achekam builds in

Several of these controls are enforced by Achekam rather than left to habit:

• Closed months. Months can be soft-closed, hard-closed and locked. A closed month refuses postings from every source, and reopening a hard close needs a second approver.
• Reconciliations a person signs off. Bank lines are matched by suggestion, and a person accepts each match. A line not yet in the books becomes a suggested journal a person approves, and a reconciliation completes only when nothing is left unexplained.
• Two-person payroll. A pay run is approved by someone other than the person who prepared it, nobody can approve a run that pays themselves, and an approved run is never recalculated. An employee's bank account entered or changed by one person must be verified by another before it is paid.
• Purchasing. A purchase order is raised from the selected quotation of an approved requisition, and the person who raised it cannot approve it.

These are control activities in COSO's terms. They still depend on the right people holding the right roles: two-person payroll needs at least two people in payroll roles. The comparison with what stays manual is in controls your accounting software should enforce.

Monitoring: checking the controls still work

Controls decay. The person who approved payments leaves and their replacement is never set up, so the owner starts approving their own transfers "just this once". Monitoring is how you catch that drift.

Simple monitoring for a small business:

1. Each quarter, pick a few payments and check who prepared and who approved them.
2. Compare budgets with actual figures every month and ask why the large differences arose. In Achekam, a business can set a budget per account and period and compare it with the ledger.
3. Confirm that every bank account was reconciled for every month, with nothing left unexplained.
4. Review the list of users and their rights, removing anyone who has left.

For more on who should hold which role, see segregation of duties.

Where to start

COSO's own guidance page for the Internal Control—Integrated Framework (2013) lists the framework and its supporting guidance on monitoring and technology. You do not need to read all of it. Take the one-page list above, add the risks particular to your business, and agree a date each quarter when someone other than the person doing the work checks that it is still being done.