There is a box somewhere in your workshop. Behind the racking, under a bench, or out in the yard under a sheet.
In it are old alternators, starter motors, brake calipers, maybe a turbo. Every one of them was swapped for a reconditioned unit, and every one of them had a deposit paid on it that you get back when the old one goes to the supplier. Some of them have been there long enough that nobody remembers which job they came off.
That box has money in it. Not a fortune, but a real number, and one that almost no independent workshop has ever counted.
How a surcharge works, and where it leaks
Exchange units are sold on a deposit. You buy a reconditioned alternator for £180 plus a £45 surcharge, so you pay £225. When the old unit goes back to the supplier, you get the £45 back.
The £45 was never a cost. It is a deposit sitting with your supplier, waiting for you to fulfil your half. If the old unit goes back, the part cost you £180. If it does not, it cost you £225, and your margin on that job was £45 thinner than you think it was.
The leak is almost always physical and almost always the same story. The old unit comes off, goes in the box because the van has already been, and stays there. A fortnight later nobody can say which unit belongs to which supplier or which job. A supplier has a return window and it closes. Somebody has a clear out.
And because none of it is recorded anywhere, the loss is invisible twice over. You do not know you did not claim it, and you do not know what it added up to.
Why it never gets caught
A surcharge is uniquely good at hiding, for three reasons.
It looks like part of the cost on the invoice. £225 on a supplier invoice does not announce that £45 of it is refundable. Once it is entered as a cost, it stops being a deposit and starts being money you spent.
The refund arrives detached from the job. Weeks later, as a credit note, on a different statement, against a different invoice. Whoever processes it has no way to connect it to the alternator on job 4471, so it lands in the general accounts and nothing reconciles back to the margin on that job.
Each one is small enough to shrug at. £45 does not trigger an investigation. Thirty of them across a year is £1,350 and still nobody has noticed, because nobody has ever seen the thirty together.
That last point is the whole reason this is worth writing about. Surcharges are not a big problem. They are a small problem that has never been added up.
Tracking it against the part, not the paperwork
The fix is to stop treating the surcharge as a line on a supplier invoice and start treating it as a state that a specific unit is in.
In Vehiso, a part can carry a surcharge, and when one is fitted the workshop is holding an old unit that is owed back. That gives you three things you did not have.
A list. Which exchange units are sitting in the box, what each is worth, which supplier each belongs to, and which job each came off. The list is the product here. Most of the loss disappears the moment somebody can see it on a screen rather than guess at it in a yard.
A closing action. When the old unit goes back and the supplier acknowledges it, that gets recorded, the item comes off the list, and the job it belonged to is settled at the real cost.
A write-off. Sometimes the unit is genuinely gone, or the window closed, or the core was too damaged to be accepted. That gets recorded as a write-off rather than quietly evaporating. Which sounds like a small thing and is not, because a write-off is a number. Once the ones you lose are counted, you find out whether this is a rounding error or a habit worth fixing.
Being straight about the boundary: this is record-keeping for units you are holding, not an automated claim to your supplier. You still have to put the alternator on the van. What changes is that somebody knows it is there and what it is worth.
The first thing to do, before any software
Go and look in the box.
Genuinely. Before configuring anything, count what is in there, work out roughly what each unit is worth, and find out how many are past the point where the supplier will take them. That number is your answer to whether this matters in your workshop. For some it will be a couple of hundred pounds and a mild annoyance. For a busy shop doing a lot of exchange work it can be several thousand a year.
Then decide the routine, which is more important than the system. Old units go back on the next delivery from that supplier, not eventually. The box is for what is waiting for a van, not for what nobody has dealt with.
Where the surcharge should show up
Two places, and they answer different questions.
On the job, so the margin is right. A job where the core went back made what you think it made. A job where it did not made £45 less, and that should be visible rather than averaged into a general sense that parts are decent. That is the same argument as your labour figure is honest, your parts figure is a guess, applied to the smallest leak in the building.
On a list of what you are holding, so somebody can act. The margin figure tells you what already happened. The list tells you what you can still put right this week.
Not every workshop needs this
If you do two exchange units a year, put the old one in the van and forget this post. The tracking is worth having when exchange work is a regular part of what you do, which usually means electrical and driveline work in volume.
The wider point holds either way, and it is the same one running through all of this: parts money leaks in small, specific, physical ways, and every one of them is invisible until something writes it down.
Where to go next
- Your labour figure is honest. Your parts figure is a guess.
- What a part costs is not what you paid for it
- Eleven on the system, seven on the shelf
- Workshop parts management on the Vehiso site
Surcharge tracking is part of Vehiso Workshop at no extra cost, and is not available on the Free plan.
