Parts inventory is not a quantity. It is your margin.

Parts are money sitting still. In a workshop that money looks like engine oil, transmission fluid, coolant, brake pads, filters, batteries and plugs. At an electronics repair counter it looks like screens, batteries, connectors and ICs. The shelves could not be less alike, and yet both leak profit the same way: the moment stock is recorded as a quantity and nothing else, the margin on your reports becomes a guess wearing a tidy suit.

Automan records parts as value rather than as a number in a quantity column. Every delivery keeps the cost you actually paid for it, and that is the figure pulled out again when a part goes onto a vehicle, into a handset, or across the counter.

The same part, three prices, one wrong margin

This is where informal record-keeping does its quietest damage, and the shape of it depends on your trade.

In a workshop. You buy synthetic engine oil three times in a month. The first drum lands at one price, the second is dearer because the exchange rate moved, and the third is dearer still because you ran out mid-queue and bought retail from the shop down the road to finish a job. Then a car comes in for four litres and an oil filter. What did that job actually cost you? If the honest answer is “roughly”, then the monthly service margin you have been reading is also roughly.

At a counter. Same mechanic, different object. One battery model gets bought three times at three prices and sold at a fourth. Assume the middle purchase price and the recorded margin is too generous. The technician did not reach for the middle delivery; they reached for whatever was in front of them.

A few thousand rupiah on one job is nothing. Across several hundred jobs a month it becomes the gap between a business that looks profitable on paper and a bank balance that never quite agrees. That gap has a name in every trade: phantom profit.

Each delivery keeps its own cost on the stock card

Automan splits inventory by the delivery it arrived on. Each purchase enters as its own group carrying its own date and its own cost, instead of being poured into one undifferentiated bucket.

You pick how the cost comes out again, once, for the whole shop:

• FIFO — oldest stock leaves first. This suits anything with a shelf life or a supplier warranty clock running against it — oils, coolant, brake fluid, batteries — because it stops old stock hiding at the back of a shelf until it is no longer fit to fit.
• Average. The weighted average is recalculated as new supply arrives. This suits owners who would rather not think about individual deliveries but still need a cost figure that behaves consistently in reports and in profit-share calculations.

Either way, you never create a second product record because a price changed. One part stays one part. What differs underneath is what each delivery cost, and the app decides which one leaves.

One item, two units of measure

Workshops almost never buy and consume in the same unit. Oil arrives by the jug or the drum and leaves by the litre, split across three different vehicles in an afternoon. Grease arrives by the tin and leaves by the gram. Counters have the same problem with different objects: charging connectors bought by the box of fifty, sold one at a time.

Multi-unit items handle this. You define the purchasing unit, the usage unit, and the conversion between them once. After that, remaining quantity and remaining value are the app’s arithmetic, not yours. Nobody has to work out what half a jug of oil is worth in order to close the day.

Stock movements: purchases add quantity, repair usage subtracts it, and each row points to its source transaction. (App UI shown in Indonesian.)

Serial numbers for the parts that get argued about later

Some parts generate a conversation weeks after they were fitted, and by then nobody’s memory is evidence.

At a repair counter the classic case is a screen. A customer returns a fortnight later with a cracked display and calls it a manufacturing fault. Without a unique identity on the part you fitted, you have no way to distinguish your screen from a similar one that came from somewhere else.

In a workshop the part that starts the most arguments is the battery. A warranty battery that dies in two months might genuinely be defective, or it might have been swapped elsewhere in the meantime. A serial recorded when the part entered stock closes that gap without anyone having to accuse anyone.

Automan records serial numbers and IMEI per unit for items that need one. Checking a warranty becomes a matter of opening the record rather than deciding who sounds more certain.

Salvaged parts do not appear from nowhere

Repair businesses do something retail shops never do: they take parts off other units.

At a counter, technicians pull cameras, speakers and button flexes from dead handsets bought cheaply as scrap, because the new component is out of production. In a workshop, used parts off another vehicle are routine for older models where a new component is scarce or absurdly priced.

Ordinary stock software has no place to put this, so it does not get recorded, and the salvaged part is treated as free. The job that used it then looks wonderfully profitable, when in truth you consumed an asset you paid cash for and never wrote it down.

Automan supports salvaged and cannibalised parts as first-class stock: they keep an origin and a value. The cost of that repair stays honest, which means the price you set for that kind of repair can be honest too.

Stock counts that leave a trail

Discrepancies are not a sign of a badly run shop. They happen everywhere goods are handled by people in a hurry. What separates a healthy business from a leaking one is what happens after the discrepancy is found.

In Automan a stock count writes the difference as a traceable adjustment — dated, quantified, valued — not as a number nudged until it matches. So when the same brake pad reference comes up short three counts in a row, that is no longer a feeling you cannot act on. It is a documented pattern, and patterns can be addressed without accusing the whole workshop.

The catalogue does not start as a blank page

Being handed an empty product list and told to type in four hundred part names is the single most common reason a stock system is abandoned in week two.

The Business Type Wizard — six steps in order: Store, Units, Service, Products, Notes & Rules, then Review — builds a starting catalogue structure for the trade you select.

Choose the car workshop profile and the categories arrive organised the way a workshop actually organises a shelf: Lubricants & Fluids (engine oil, transmission fluid and ATF, coolant, brake fluid) and Spare Parts (oil, air and cabin filters, brake pads and braking system, plugs and ignition, car batteries, suspension and steering, belts and timing). The motorcycle profile adapts again, down to motorcycle engine oil and CVT servicing. The electronics profile brings its own categories instead.

Every seeded entry can be deleted and replaced with your own. It is a starting point, not a rulebook — which matters if your parts naming follows a supplier catalogue you have used for fifteen years.

One boundary to know before you plan: a single Store App serves one kind of unit — vehicles or general electronics. If you run both a motorcycle workshop and a phone counter, they run as two Store Apps under one account rather than one mixed catalogue.

Inventory is not an island

Correct stock value is only useful if it travels, and here it does.

Every sale through the point of sale reduces stock and takes its cost with it. Parts used by a mechanic or technician during a job are drawn from the right delivery through repair management. Anything that turns out to be wrong or faulty before it is fitted — a brake pad in the wrong specification, a filter with a transposed part number, a screen with dead pixels — is recorded through returns, claims and corrections with the delivery it arrived on attached, which is what gives a supplier claim something to stand on.

Running more than one location? Parts idling at one site can move to the site that needs them through inter-store stock transfer, with their cost carried across instead of reset to zero.

All of it lands in owner financial reports and repair shop accounting that rest on real cost of goods.

What changes from the owner’s chair

Job-level profit becomes a number. Four litres and a filter has a cost you can open, not one you infer from whichever invoice you happen to remember.

Expensive parts stop disappearing quietly. Batteries, screens and high-value components carry a trail: which purchase they came from, which job took them out, on what date.

Purchasing gets a basis. You can see which references turn over weekly and which have not moved since the last dry season, so capital stops accumulating on a shelf for a model that rarely comes in.

Variances become maintenance rather than suspicion. Because adjustments are recorded with their value attached, the conversation about missing stock stops being about trust.

Two honest notes before you import anything

Automan was built in Indonesia and is priced there: Lite at Rp 0, Pro at Rp 15,000 per month, with no separate USD list, and support in Bahasa Indonesia. The seeded vehicle catalogue carries brands common across Southeast Asia — Toyota, Daihatsu, Honda, Suzuki, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Wuling and Hyundai on the car side; Honda, Yamaha, Suzuki, Kawasaki and Vespa on the motorcycle side. That makes it an easy fit in that region and a partial one elsewhere. You can delete every seeded entry and enter your own, but you deserve to know where the app starts.

There is also no offline mode in the web app. Stock movements, sales and repair jobs all require a live connection there, and there is no local queue that catches up afterwards; the exception is field work, where the Automan Mobile Android app keeps working when the signal drops and syncs its queued transactions once the signal returns. For most shops that is a non-issue; for a workshop on the edge of coverage it is the deciding factor, and we would rather say so on this page than in a support ticket.

Start with the shelf that causes the most trouble

You do not have to move the whole store on day one. Start with the group that goes missing most often or ties up the most cash — oils and filters in a workshop, screens and batteries at a counter — and let the long tail follow. Products and opening stock import from a spreadsheet template, and accounting opening balances go in through the opening-balance wizard.

Lite is free permanently and takes no card, which is enough to test one shelf against your own numbers before deciding anything.

Prefer to look before you type? Walk through the repair workflow demo to follow one part from the shelf to the profit report, read the full picture for auto repair shops or phone repair shops, and compare what each plan covers on the pricing page.