Saturday evening. Your rep gets home. Two boxes of stock still sit on the back of his motorbike. His pocket holds cash that adds up to “roughly”. His head holds the records: shop A took ten, shop B paid half, shop C handed back three that would not sell. None of it is written down anywhere.
That night you count, and the numbers refuse to meet. The rep says he will check tomorrow. Tomorrow he forgets — and so do you.
If your parts store sells on the road by consigning goods to sales reps, that scene is not bad luck. It is a weekly routine. And the leak is not in one place.
Four places consigned stock leaks
Goods leave without a trace. The load is written on a paper delivery note — which gets lost, smudged, or “revised” after the fact. A week later nobody can say for certain how much the rep set out with.
Collections stick to the rep. He collects on an old customer’s receivable, takes the cash, and the record is supposed to follow. Sometimes it follows tomorrow; sometimes never. The receivable stays open in your books while the money has already changed hands.
Returns go unrecorded. Goods a customer rejects go back into the box and blend into the load. No invoice attached, no note on whether they are still sellable.
Settlement never balances. Because of the three leaks above, reconciling cash and leftover stock at the end of the day turns into guesswork. Small gaps get waved through, big gaps get argued over — and neither kind ever finds its cause.
The most painful part: all of this happens with nobody intending to cheat. Paper and memory simply cannot keep up with goods that move. It is the same pattern as stock drifting inside the store — except out in the field, the leak runs faster and further from your eyes.
The load is recorded as consignment, not a sale
Automan’s Canvassing module starts from the correct definition: goods handed down to a rep are consignment. They remain the store’s property — only the available quantity drops. Stock does not “vanish” from the books just because it is out on the road.
In practice: you put the load together on the web side, and the rep accepts it with a single tap on their phone. From that second, everything on the back of that motorbike is recorded in their name — an opening number no memory can revise.
The full web-side flow — creating a trip, loading goods, closing it out — is in the canvassing trip tutorial.
Recorded at the customer’s door, not tonight
At the customer’s place, the rep sells, collects receivables, takes returns, and notes orders straight from the phone — with the receipt printed on the spot to a Bluetooth printer. The transaction is born where it happens, not reconstructed at home that night.
Then comes the question every owner asks: what about the market with no signal? This is the mechanism that makes canvassing trustworthy: transactions are held on the phone and send themselves the moment the signal returns. Each rep holds their own quota of invoice numbers, so an invoice written offline never clashes with the register back at the store. Numbers queue; they do not collide.
To be fair about the boundary: the web version of Automan still needs the internet. What keeps running without signal is field work through the Automan Mobile Android app — and for a travelling rep, that is exactly the part that matters.
Everything a rep can do from the phone — from accepting the load to printing receipts — is walked through in the field sales tutorial.
Goods change hands on the record, even mid-route
Here is a leak few owners think about: goods moving between reps in the middle of a route. “Hold this box for me” — and from that moment, nobody knows whose responsibility it is.
In Canvassing, a handover between reps runs through a QR scan: the goods move from one rep’s load into the other’s, recorded, with a proof photo if you require one. Responsibility travels with the goods instead of evaporating between two people.
Settlement: one moment where every number meets
This is the part that turns the end of the day from an argument into arithmetic. A trip closes with a settlement: cash and leftover stock are reconciled together, in one screen.
The arithmetic takes nobody’s side. Opening load minus what sold minus what came back is the stock that must return. Cash sales plus collected receivables is the money that must be handed in.
And if there is a gap, it does not hang in the air as “we’ll talk about it later”. You choose its fate the same day, from three options: simply record it, charge it to the rep, or book it as damaged goods. Those three fates are what stop a shortfall from becoming a loose ball — every rupiah and every item ends up in one of the three, in writing.
Control stays in your hands
Not every rep is the same, and the app does not force you to treat them the same. From the canvassing settings you decide what each rep may do: add customers, change prices, collect debts, take returns on the spot, reload mid-trip — along with trip length limits and credit limits. Changes take effect at once, with no app update needed on the rep’s side.
On location, the rule is clear from the start: location recording is off by default. If you switch it on, it records only while the app is open on screen. And every phone must first be paired to the store and approved by you before it works — each rep signs in with their own user account, not a shared one.
Switching the module on and setting each permission is covered in the enable canvassing tutorial.
What to prepare before you start
Honestly, canvassing is not a button you simply press:
- Product and stock data must already be in place. Loads are drawn from recorded stock; if the stock is messy, the consignment inherits the mess.
- Each rep’s phone needs Automan Mobile installed, paired to the store, and approved by you.
- A new habit for the reps: selling, collecting, and returning through the phone instead of through memory. The first week usually takes some hand-holding.
The goods may travel; the numbers may not
Consigned stock will always be a test of trust — and the fastest way to break trust is to let the numbers blur. A tidy store is not one where every rep is a saint. A tidy store is one that hangs not a single rupiah on anyone’s memory: the load is recorded, the sales are recorded, the collections are recorded, and any settlement gap has a fate written in black and white.
The full mechanics — honest limits included — are on the Canvassing feature page.