Vehicle Export Management System

Purchasing quotes from the purchase price plus an estimated freight; finance settles from actual payments; gross margin is back-calculated once a quarter. All three numbers are defensible, and none of them agrees with the others. That is a structural problem, not an accounting skill problem.

Cost is generated stage by stage: the purchase price sits in the purchase contract, freight in the forwarder's invoice, duty and consumption tax in the tax bill, PDI and reconditioning in the work order, port and demurrage charges in the terminal invoice. Each stage has its own document, its own timing and its own basis. Rolling them into "one vehicle" is done by hand today.

1. Quotes are estimated. Freight and tax have not happened yet when the offer goes out, so it is priced on last shipment's experience. Estimate high and lose the deal; estimate low and lose margin at the end.
2. Margin is back-calculated. Divide total cost by unit count at month end and you get an average. Which car made money, which lost, and whether the losses cluster in one market or one stage — unanswerable.
3. The tax base is computed wrong. Duty, consumption tax and VAT are levied in layers; a mistake at one layer propagates to every layer above it.
4. Aftersales cost never returns to the vehicle. Warranty claims, spare-part consumption and rework labour do not come back to the VIN, so the next pricing round has no lifetime cost to work from.

What this line does is structural: cost lands on the specific VIN at the moment it occurs, so quoting, settlement, gross margin and aftersales all read the same card. That card is the per-vehicle cost card — not a report, an allocation dimension. Everything written to that dimension answers one question: how much did this car actually earn. A useful side effect is delivery credibility: when a customer asks where their car is, the answer comes from the VIN record rather than from a coordinator's memory.

The stage most often dismissed is stage four, tax allocation per VIN. Teams treat it as a finance task. It is a business-basis decision: choose the wrong allocation dimension and every downstream margin analysis is wrong. Within one shipment a 2.0-litre and a 1.5-litre engine can fall in different consumption-tax bands, and a battery-electric vehicle has a different tax composition altogether. Allocating per unit spreads the high-tax car's cost onto the low-tax car: the cheap one looks highly profitable, the expensive one looks loss-making, and the next price list raises the first and cuts the second — exactly backwards. The dimension must be tax type plus band, never unit count, and every allocation must trace back to a tax bill and a band basis so it can be explained to a customer rather than defended with a discount.

Destination customs is decided by the importing authority. All that can be done is to align documents before shipment. PDI is decided internally, but an exception found there pushes reconditioning and add-ons into the schedule — and that schedule is already written into the sales contract.

The returned path in practice looks like this: PDI finds an exception, which traces back to the condition record taken at destination customs, which traces back to the document snapshot locked before shipping, where one supporting document turns out to be missing a line. Because the document snapshot is locked at shipping, that trace takes minutes. Without it, the same trace starts from zero while the car sits in the warehouse accruing storage fees.

The boundary between stage seven and stage eight is the second thing teams get wrong. Responsibility moves from sales to aftersales after delivery, but cost collection cannot stop there. If it does, the lifetime cost of that vehicle can never be computed, and pricing decisions for the next round rest on sales margin alone.

The third is stage nine. Many systems fold returns into aftersales instead of giving them their own process. The result: the car comes back and the money does not, or the invoice is reversed and the cost card is not. Four lines must reverse together — vehicle, money, invoice and cost card — and each of them touches something different. Miss one and the ledger keeps a remainder that surfaces at the quarterly stocktake.

Logistics is booked by occurrence date, not by settlement month. Freight priced per container is a cost of that container; allocating it to the VIN needs a time point. Using the settlement month loses which shipment went wrong. The price is more bookkeeping by the business side; the return is being able to answer why that batch was expensive. Monthly summaries only guarantee that next year's quote reuses the average and the same problem repeats.

The export tax rebate belongs in sale and collection, not in purchase cost. Accounting treats it as a cost reduction, but operationally it is the last link of the collection chain, governed by declaration and review progress. Put it in purchase cost and the card has two versions — before and after the rebate arrives — with no way to tell which one a quote used. Put it in the collection group and the card stabilises at deal time, with the rebate tracked as a separate cash inflow. A practical test: if a field's value can change between quoting and collection, it must not sit in the groups a quote reads, or the team will stop updating it and the card dies.

All 16 product lines sit on one base, and country differences are delivered as pluggable packs: a core pack plus 16 country packs, 17 in total. A pack carries customs process, tax basis, certification requirements, document templates, currency and language. Changing market changes the pack; the main process does not move.

Two rules worth stating. A distributor sees their own orders, not the line's data: the portal is isolated per distributor, so one overseas dealer cannot see another's orders, prices or delivery dates. And cost never goes to the mobile terminal, while the wallboard stops at aggregates — the field terminal is for fast, accurate capture, and showing per-car margin there has no use case, only a wider leak surface.

The brand website does not publish prices. Destination prices depend on local tax, channel markup and promotion, so a single published price conflicts with actual local transactions. Its job is to present and to capture enquiries; the deal is concluded at store level.

1. Treating total cost divided by unit count as unit cost. It erases exactly the differences between model, market and batch that pricing needs.
2. Computing tax as landed value times one rate. Duty, consumption tax and VAT are layered; a single rate overstates low-displacement cars and understates high-displacement ones, in opposite directions.
3. Recomputing historical cost at the current exchange rate. Once a cost card exists it should hold the rate and tax amount of that moment; otherwise delivered cars change margin every month and nobody dares use the number.
4. Treating PDI as a formality. One exception on the sheet can mean reconditioning, add-ons or replacement — against a delivery date already contracted.
5. Writing destination rules into the main process. How many documents, how tax bands, which certification scheme — all change by market. The second market disproves the first.
6. Letting aftersales cost stay outside the VIN file. Delivery becomes a cut-off point, and the next pricing round has sales margin without lifetime cost.

If yes, the collection structure already exists and this line mostly systematises it. If no, what is missing is not software but the allocation dimension — and establishing that dimension is what this line does.

1. Take the most recent delivered batch and try to cost one vehicle completely; note how many layers you can break it into (most teams reach freight, not tax and preparation).
2. Compare against the six field groups in section 4 and mark which groups you are missing today.
3. Walk the nine stages in the demo against your actual process and find the stage that breaks.
4. For a specific market's entry requirements, read the corresponding country pack page.