Recording vehicle costs

Vehicle costs are how you track everything you've spent getting a specific vehicle ready for sale. They feed the Financial summary card, the outstanding balance on the Customer Sale tab, and the cost breakdown on the Costs tab.

Before you start

• You need Vehicle costs view or edit permission.
• You're on a vehicle's detail page.

Adding costs

Click Add cost in the action bar (or open the Costs tab and click Add cost) to open the cost dialog. You can record several costs in one go: each row is a separate cost line with its own description, quantity, unit price, and category.

For each row, fill in:

• Description (e.g. "Front brake disc")
• Qty (defaults to 1)
• Unit price (per unit)
• Category (one of the six categories below)

The line total updates automatically as quantity x unit price. Click Add row to add more lines, or the trash icon to remove one.

Saving costs you reuse

If you record the same line item often (compliance plate, roadworthy, common parts), you can save it as a preset.

• Click the star at the end of a row to save it when you click Add costs. The star fills in to confirm.
• Start typing in Description to see saved costs you've already added. Click one to fill the row.

See Saved costs for the full guide.

Below the rows, set the currency for this batch (defaults to your accounting currency). If the currency is foreign, a conversion rate field appears so the totals roll up correctly.

The grand total shows at the bottom. Click Add costs to save them all in one go. Each row appears in the Costs tab and the Financial summary card on the Overview updates.

Categories

Costs fall into one of six categories:

• Purchase: the vehicle purchase price, auction fees, and any exporter fees paid to acquire the vehicle.
• Transport: every step of moving the vehicle, including inland transport at origin, ocean freight, marine insurance, port and storage charges, and final delivery.
• Taxes & Duties: import duties and import VAT or equivalent destination-country taxes.
• Parts & Labour: workshop parts and labour, often recorded automatically when a workshop task is completed and costed.
• Preparation: inspection, registration, and plates.
• Other: anything that doesn't fit the categories above.

Adding costs from a workshop task

When you click Add cost from a completed workshop task that needs costing, the dialog shows extra helpers:

• Workshop notes at the top: the parts notes the workshop left when marking the task done. If they used commas to separate items, each item appears as a clickable chip. Click a chip to drop it into a new cost row as the description; click Add all as rows to do them all at once.
• Highlight any text in the notes box and click Add selection to turn that phrase into a row. Useful when the workshop wrote a sentence rather than comma-separated parts.
• Labour row pre-filled when the task had a time taken value. The row appears tinted, with the description set to "Labour", quantity set to the hours, and the unit price set to your default labour rate (Settings > Workshop). Edit anything if needed, or remove the row entirely.

Click Add costs & mark complete to save the rows AND clear the "cost needs adding" flag on the task in one click. If the cost was actually added elsewhere (an invoice in your accounting system, for example), use the Mark complete only link at the bottom of the dialog.

Editing or deleting a cost

• Click the pencil icon on any row to edit
• Click the trash icon to delete (with a confirmation)
• Only team members with edit costs permission can make changes

Reading the Cost breakdown

The Cost breakdown card on the Costs tab has two sides.

On the left, a list of categories shows each one's subtotal and a bar indicating its share of the total cost. Click any category to focus the right pane on it.

On the right, the focused category shows its name, subtotal, entry count, and percentage of total, followed by a table of every line item in that category: description, quantity, unit price, and total in your accounting currency.

The summary tiles in the card header track three numbers as you add costs:

• Cost total: everything spent on this vehicle so far, including its share of any allocated shipment costs.
• Advertised: the price you've set on the vehicle.
• Margin: advertised price minus cost total.

Use Edit costs in the card header to change or remove existing entries, and Add cost to record new ones.

Shipment-allocated costs

When a vehicle is part of a shipment, any costs recorded at the shipment level (freight, customs per container, insurance) are divided across the vehicles in that container. The vehicle detail page shows this as Allocated shipment cost.

You don't add this cost directly on the vehicle. It comes from the shipment record and updates automatically when the shipment's costs or vehicle list change.

For how to add costs at the shipment level, see the Shipments & Logistics category.

Good to know

• Costs are stored per-vehicle. Deleting a vehicle soft-deletes its costs along with it.
• Currency on a cost is independent of your organisation's default currency, so mixed-currency costs are allowed.
• The Financial summary card shows headline totals in your organisation's accounting currency; individual cost rows show their own currency.