How does Vehiso handle parts across several branches?

The parts catalogue is shared across the group, and stock is held per branch. Each branch keeps its own stock levels, shelf locations, reorder points and cost.

Why is cost kept per branch?

Branches buy differently, so each one has its own weighted average cost from what that branch actually paid. Pooling costs would let one branch's buying flatter another's figures.

Can one branch see another branch's stock?

Yes. With a shared catalogue, a branch can see stock held at other sites before raising an order. Whether to transfer or order stays a judgement call for the team.

Is there a trade counter or a factor catalogue feed?

No. It is a workshop parts department built around the job card, with no over-the-counter sales or parts e-commerce, and no live feed from a factor's catalogue. Your own catalogue can be loaded by CSV import.

Parts is included with Vehiso Workshop at no extra cost. Workshop is on the paid plans, from £49 a month, and is not available on the Free plan.

Multi-Branch Parts Stock: One Catalogue, Stock Per Site

Q: How are transfers between branches recorded?

As a matched pair: stock out of one branch and stock into the other, recorded as two halves of the same event, with both in the movement history.

The second site changes the question.

With one workshop, parts is a stock problem: what is on the shelf, what is promised, what needs ordering. With two, it becomes a co-ordination problem, and the symptoms are specific enough that any group manager will recognise them.

The Oldbury branch orders a water pump on next-day delivery. There are two on the shelf at Tipton, nineteen minutes away. Nobody at Oldbury knew and nobody at Tipton had any reason to mention it.

A part gets carried between sites in somebody's boot. It leaves one stock figure and never arrives at the other, so one branch is permanently short on paper and the other is permanently over.

At the end of the month there are two parts margin figures and no group figure, or there is a group figure built by adding two spreadsheets together, which nobody entirely trusts.

Shared catalogue, separate stock

The structure that fixes this is one line long, and getting it the wrong way round is the usual mistake.

The catalogue is shared. The stock is not.

A part is defined once for the group: its number, its description, its supplier, what it is. Every branch is looking at the same BP-1147, which means a group can actually ask what it spends on brake pads, and a transfer between sites is a transfer of the same thing rather than a guess that two similar records are the same part.

What is held per branch is everything physical or local:

Stock levels. On hand, reserved and available, counted at the site where the parts are.

Where it lives on the shelf. Bin A1-03 at Oldbury has nothing to do with where the same part sits at Tipton.

Reorder points. A busy site turning over pads weekly needs a different trigger from a site that sells two a month.

Cost. This is the one people miss. Each branch has its own weighted average, calculated from what that branch actually paid, because branches buy differently. Pooling costs across a group makes the branch that buys well subsidise the one that does not, in the reporting, invisibly. The reasoning is in what a part costs is not what you paid for it.

Get that split right and most of the group problems stop being problems. Nobody is maintaining two catalogues. Nobody is looking at a stock figure that includes parts sitting twenty miles away.

Transfers have two ends

The boot-of-a-car transfer is where multi-site stock figures go to die, and the fix is unglamorous.

A transfer is recorded as a matched pair. Stock out of one branch, stock into the other, recorded as two halves of the same event rather than as two independent adjustments that somebody has to remember to make.

Why it matters is the same reason the stock take post matters: both halves land in the movement ledger, so when Tipton is three short at the next count, the history says three went to Oldbury on the 18th. It is not a mystery to be absorbed, it is a movement with a date and a destination. That whole argument is in eleven on the system, seven on the shelf.

The discipline this replaces is somebody at each end remembering to adjust a number. That discipline fails, not occasionally but reliably, and it fails worst when everybody is busy.

Seeing the other branch before you order

The water pump problem is solved by visibility rather than by any clever logic.

When the catalogue is shared and stock is per branch, the stock position across sites is a property of the part rather than something anybody has to go and ask about. Oldbury can see there are two at Tipton before raising an order.

What happens next is a judgement call, not an automatic one, and it should stay that way. Sometimes a transfer is obviously right. Sometimes a nineteen-minute round trip for a £40 part is a false economy against a next-day delivery, particularly if it takes a technician away from a ramp. Sometimes Tipton needs both of theirs.

Software's job here is to make sure the decision is made with the information rather than without it. A group that transfers everything on principle has just invented a courier business.

Reordering per site, buying as a group

Two things pull in different directions here and both are legitimate.

Reordering is a branch activity. The worksheet at each site lists the parts where available plus what is already on order has dropped to the reorder point, groups them by preferred supplier, and drafts a purchase order for each. That is a parts desk job at the site that needs the parts, because they are the ones who know what is going on.

Supplier spend is a group question. What the group spends with each factor, across every site, is the number that gives you a negotiating position, and it is invisible if each branch only ever sees its own.

Both work off the same shared catalogue, which is the whole point of sharing it.

The number the group actually wants

For most dealer groups this is the reason to do any of it: a parts gross profit figure that consolidates.

Per branch, so you can see which site is running which margin and ask why. Across the group, so parts is a line in the group's numbers rather than something that only exists site by site.

And it has to mean the same thing everywhere, which it does when every branch is recording cost on the line the same way. Keep the definition straight: parts gross profit is sell price minus the cost recorded on the line. It carries no carriage, no labour and no overhead. It is the same definition at one site or five, which is exactly why the consolidated figure is worth having.

What not to expect

Two boundaries worth stating, because groups ask about both.

There is no trade counter. This is a workshop parts department built around the job card. It does not do over-the-counter sales to the public, customer parts orders or parts e-commerce, at one branch or at five.

There is no live feed from a factor's catalogue. The parts are yours, either typed onto a job or loaded into your own catalogue. If you are setting a group up, the catalogue comes in by CSV import, with a dry run that tells you which rows it cannot read before anything is created. Start with the lines you genuinely stock rather than trying to model the whole factor.