Five numbers to check every Monday on a small used car lot

A franchise dealership runs on a dashboard with forty metrics and a manager for each. A one-person lot runs on the owner’s memory, and memory is a poor dashboard: it remembers the good cars, forgets the one in the back row, and only notices the cash position when the bank does.

Five numbers are enough. They take ten minutes on a Monday if the records exist, and they answer the only questions a small lot has: is the month working, can I buy this week, which car is costing me, am I buying right, and what do I do today. Here they are, with the arithmetic for each and the decision each one drives.

1. Cars sold this month, against cars needed

Every lot has a break-even in cars per month: fixed costs plus what you pay yourself, divided by net profit per car. What a one-person lot costs per month builds the fixed costs; net profit per car builds the divisor. For a lot with $2,700 of fixed costs, $3,000 of owner’s pay and $1,300 of net per car, the number is 4.4, so five.

The Monday question is how many have sold toward it, and how many Mondays are left. Two sold by the third Monday against five needed is not a bad month yet; it is a week to move prices on the cars that have sat, which is number 3. The number on the wall turns “it feels slow” into a figure with a deadline.

2. Cash tied up in inventory

Add up the full cost of every unsold car: purchase plus everything spent on it so far. That is the lot’s capital, and it is the number that decides whether you can buy on Thursday.

It is also the number that makes aged cars real. Twelve cars at $40,000 of cost with $4,000 in the bank is a lot that cannot bid however good the lane looks, and the only cure is a sale, which usually means a price cut on the oldest unit. How much money you need to flip cars is the same calculation at the start of the business; this is the weekly version of it.

If the cars are floored, add the curtailments due this month beside the figure, because they are cash out on a schedule the sales do not control. What a floor plan costs per day shows a 10% curtailment at day 30 and day 60 pulling $1,400 out of the business on one $7,000 car before it sells.

3. Every car by days held

Not the average. The list, sorted oldest first, with what each car has cost so far and its current asking price.

Floor plan lenders cite 45 days as the industry best practice for turning inventory. Cox Automotive put cars under $15,000 at 29 days’ supply in August 2026, which is the pace a correctly priced cheap car should sell at. So the list has three bands. Under 30 days: leave it alone unless there have been no enquiries at all. 30 to 60: the price moves this week, because the car is now costing more per day than it is likely to recover by waiting. Past 60: a decision, not a wait, which is wholesale, a hard price cut or a reason you can write down. The aged inventory playbook is the full version.

The reason this is a Monday number and not a monthly one is that a car moves from 28 days to 35 in one week, and the lot that looks monthly finds it at 50.

4. Real profit per car, this month’s sales

For every car sold this month: sale price minus every cost on the car. Purchase, fees, transport, parts, labour at a rate, detail, listing, title, floor plan days and the surprise. Not sale minus purchase, which overstates the figure by several hundred dollars on a cheap car; the true cost of a car lists the lines.

Public dealer groups reported about $1,634 of used gross per vehicle retailed in Q2 2026, and what is a good gross profit per car explains why that is the wrong target for an independent lot. The Monday use of the number is narrower: it tells you whether this month’s buying was right while there is still time to change next week’s. Three cars at $1,500 and one at $300 is a lane to stop buying from or a reconditioning estimate that was wrong, and the record says which. Divided by days held it becomes profit per day of capital, which days on the lot argues is the only figure that compares two cars fairly.

5. The one car to act on today

The first four numbers produce a short list. This one picks from it. The oldest car with the biggest gap between its cost and its likely sale price, or the car whose curtailment lands Friday, or the car that has had no enquiry in two weeks at a price the comparables say is high.

Then the action: the price moves on the listing today, the car goes to the wholesale lane Thursday, or the photos are retaken because the first one is why nobody taps. How to sell a flipped car on Facebook Marketplace in 7 days is the relisting routine. One car, one action, every Monday, and the back row never grows.

Why the routine fails, and the fix

Most lots that try a weekly review stop within a month, and it is never because the numbers were useless. It is because producing them took an afternoon: the receipts were in the truck, the floor plan statement was on the lender’s portal, the sale prices were in a message thread, and by the time the list was built the Monday was gone.

Every one of the five is a report if costs are logged on the car on the day they happen, and a reconstruction if they are not. How to track car flipping expenses is the logging habit, and car flipping bookkeeping is why the same records are what the accountant wants in February.

The free car flipping spreadsheet gives a few cars the columns the five numbers need. The Deelary app keeps every car with its costs and days held on the phone, so cars sold, cash in inventory, the aged list and real profit per sale are on the screen when you open it, and the Monday routine is the ten minutes it was meant to be.