The flip made $2,200. Or it made $1,185. Only one of those is true.

Here is a flip the way it gets told. Bought at $6,200 at the Tuesday sale. Sold eleven weeks later at $8,400. Made $2,200.

Here is the same flip the way the bank saw it. $6,200 hammer. $350 buyer fee. $40 gate fee. $180 tow home. $240 for two tires and an alignment. $120 of small parts. $90 detail. $35 for the listing. $85 for the title transfer. And eleven weeks in which the $6,200 could have been in the next car and was not. Sale price $8,400. Profit $1,060, before you price the eleven weeks at all.

Nobody lies about the first version. They just remember it, because it is the version with the big round numbers in it. The second version is nine small receipts and a calendar, and that is exactly what a phone is for.

What the app does while you are standing at the car

• Scan the VIN in the lane. Point the camera at the plate and the make, model, year, engine and body fill themselves in. The car exists in the app before you have paid for it, which means the hammer price goes in while it is still fresh.
• Photograph the receipt at the counter. The amount, the date and the category are read on the device, attached to the car, and the total moves. You do not type it in later. Later is where receipts go to be forgotten.
• Watch the projected profit change. Every cost you add moves that car's total cost and the margin at your asking price. The number is on the screen when you are deciding whether to do the brakes or leave them.
• Negotiate with the floor on the screen. When a buyer says $7,900, the calculator shows what $7,900 leaves you after everything already on the car. You answer with a number instead of a feeling.
• Count the days without trying. Each car shows how long you have had it. A nudge at 45 days, a harder one at 75. Sitting is the only cost on a flip that never sends an invoice.

The number the headline always hides

Flippers do not usually lose money on the car. They lose it on the carrying. A car that sits for ten weeks is not costing you nothing. It is costing you the flip you could not buy because the cash was in that one. If you turn a car in three weeks, a $1,000 margin is $1,000 every three weeks. If the same car takes twelve weeks, it is the same $1,000 spread over a quarter of a year, and the lane that produced it was not cheap, it was slow.

That is why the app shows days held next to profit on every car and in every report. Margin by itself is a story. Margin and days together is a business.

After a dozen flips it starts teaching you

Profit and days held are reported by source and by make. That is the point where the pattern shows up. The lane that felt cheap but always needed another $400. The badge that sells in two weeks every time. The price band where cars move and the price band where they sit. You can hold three cars honestly in your head. You cannot hold thirty, and the thirty are where the lesson is.

The cars that went badly get rounded off in memory. They are exactly the ones the report keeps.

Try the numbers before you install anything

If you want to see what a real flip looks like with every line counted, the flip profit calculator runs the same arithmetic the app does, on one car, in the browser. If you are still on a spreadsheet, the free car flipping spreadsheet is the same columns in Excel and Google Sheets. Both are free and neither asks for an email.

Before you scale up

Two things catch flippers who start doing well. The first is the licence threshold in their state. Sell more than a handful of cars in a year and most states want you licensed, and the number varies from four to none at all. Do you need a dealer licence to flip cars covers where the lines fall, and the state-by-state licence guide gives the fee, the bond, the lot rule and the statute for each state we have covered.

The second is buying a car whose history you did not check. Clean, salvage and rebuilt titles and how to check if a car is stolen are the two to read before the next sale.

Price

Free for two active cars, every feature included. Sold cars do not count, so if you run one or two at a time the free plan is the whole plan. Deelary Pro is $8.99 a month or $49.99 a year with a 7-day free trial, billed through your Apple ID. Details on the pricing page.

Runs on iPhone and iPad, works offline in the yard and the shed, and exports every car to CSV whenever you want it. Running a lot rather than a driveway? Deelary for solo dealers is the same app from the lot's side.