Everything about the car is somewhere. That is the problem.
Not lost. Just scattered across a notebook, a camera roll, a calendar and a glovebox, where none of it adds up to a number you can trust.
The receipt for the tires is in the glovebox. The purchase price is in a notebook on the passenger seat. The shop appointment is in the phone calendar and the buyer's viewing is on a sticky note. The VIN is a photo in the camera roll, somewhere behind four hundred other photos. The asking price is in your head, and it moves.
None of it is lost. It is all there. It is in eleven places, and no two of them talk to each other.
So when a buyer asks what you can do on the price, you answer from memory. Memory is generous. It remembers the $8,000 you paid. It quietly drops the $500 of tires, the $200 detail, the tow, the $50 listing, and the six weeks the money sat in that car instead of buying the next one.
The software that was supposed to solve this
Dealer management systems exist, and they are good at what they were built for: a lot with a building, a desk, staff, a service department and a finance office. They are priced that way too, with a monthly figure, a contract, a setup call and a training session before you can enter your first car.
If you are running twelve cars at a time with people working for you, that is a fair trade. If you are running two, it is absurd. So almost everyone buying, fixing and selling a handful of cars ends up with the other option: a spreadsheet, updated when they remember, which means updated after the number has already stopped being true.
The work does not happen at a desk
This is what the desktop tools miss. Buying a car, reconditioning it and selling it is standing-up work.
You are at the parts counter when the receipt prints. You are in the yard when the tow arrives. You are on the phone when the buyer asks whether Saturday works. You are under the hood when the mechanic tells you what the real number is going to be.
By the time you sit down near a computer, half of it has already slipped, and the half that slipped is always the same half: the small costs. They are the ones that decide whether the month was good.
What Deelary does instead
One app, and everything attaches to the car it belongs to.
Photograph the receipt at the counter and the app reads the amount, the date and the category on the device itself. Scan the VIN and the make, model, year, engine and body fill themselves in. Every cost you add moves that car's total cost, its margin and its projected profit right then, not at month end.
Open the app and you see where each car stands: in transit, in repair, for sale, sold. How many days it has been sitting. What it has really cost so far. What it will actually earn at the price you are asking. Showings, test drives and shop visits sit on the car as well, with reminders, so Saturday's viewing does not depend on you remembering it on Friday night.
At 45 days a car asks for a second look. At 75 it asks for a decision. Days on the lot explains why those two numbers matter more than most dealers think.
What Deelary is not
It does not build you a website, run your ads or manage a sales team. There is no module for everything. It does one job: it keeps the true number on every car, so you know what you made instead of estimating it.
That narrowness is deliberate. A tool that tries to run your whole business needs setup, training and a reason to open it every day. A tool that answers one question can be opened with one hand while you are standing in a yard.
The price is part of the point
Free for up to two active cars, with every feature working. Deelary Pro is $8.99 a month or $49.99 a year, with a 7-day free trial, billed through your Apple ID. One cost you would otherwise have forgotten on one car pays for the year.
It works offline, because auction sheds and yards do. Your records export to CSV whenever you want them, because they are yours and they should never be hostage to a subscription.
Where to start
Put one car in. The one you are least sure about. Add everything you have spent on it so far, including the small receipts you would normally leave out, and look at what the margin actually is.
That number is usually the reason people keep the app.
Questions go to support@deelary.com, and the blog covers auctions, costs and the numbers behind them in more depth.