Accounting built for car dealers that actually balances.

Why generic bookkeeping software breaks on a car lot

QuickBooks is good software. It is just not built around a VIN. A dealership's core unit of profit is a single vehicle that arrives with a purchase price, gathers recon and transport and pack, sits on a floorplan line accruing interest by the day, and eventually leaves with a front gross and a back gross attached to it. Generic accounting has no place to put that. Dealers end up keeping the real numbers in a spreadsheet and the tax numbers in the accounting app, and the two stop agreeing somewhere around the third month.

The usual workarounds all leak. Classes and jobs get you part of the way, until you have 90 units in stock and 90 classes. A monthly journal entry lumps recon into one number, so you can see that you spent $18,000 on reconditioning and never see which cars ate it. And a nightly sync from a DMS that posts summary totals reconciles beautifully right up to the first time somebody backs out a deal.

What per-VIN accounting actually changes

In Loturn the ledger and the vehicle record are the same data. When you buy a car, the entry posts. When the body shop invoice comes in, you attach it to the VIN and it capitalizes into that unit's cost rather than landing in a shop-expense bucket. When the deal closes, COGS relieves inventory and the gross falls out of arithmetic you can trace, not an estimate.

• Recon is capitalized, not expensed. Parts and labor raise the cost of the unit they were spent on, which is the only way a per-car gross means anything. See recon.
• Floorplan is a liability with daily interest. Carry cost accrues against the specific unit, and curtailments post when they are due instead of surfacing as a surprise draft.
• Pack is visible. If you add a pack to every unit, the books show gross before and after it, so you can pay a commission on one number and read the business on the other.
• F&I income and chargebacks tie to the deal. Reserve posts when it is earned and a chargeback reverses against the same deal months later, so back gross stops drifting.

Dealer accounting acronyms, decoded

Dealer financial statements are written in shorthand. Here is the set that shows up most, and what each one does to your numbers.

The full list lives in the dealer glossary.

Keeping your accountant, and QuickBooks

You do not have to fire anyone to use this. Loturn keeps the operational books, the ones that answer what this car made and what the lot is carrying, and pushes a clean summary to QuickBooks for tax work. Your accountant gets journal-level totals that balance instead of a shoebox, and you stop maintaining two versions of the truth. If you would rather run everything in Loturn, the chart of accounts is already dealer-shaped and the statements come out of the same ledger your profit reports read from.

Common questions

Do I need an accountant to set this up?

No. The dealer chart of accounts ships configured. Most dealers are posting deals the day they import inventory.

Is this real double-entry accounting?

Yes. Every buy, recon line, sale, fee, and floorplan charge posts a balanced entry. The P&L, balance sheet, and cash flow read off that one ledger, which is why they reconcile.

What happens to my history if I switch?

Bring inventory and open deals across and start the ledger at your changeover date. Prior periods stay where they are, closed and filed, and you are not re-keying two years of entries to get going.

Does it handle buy here pay here?

BHPH changes the revenue picture, since you hold the note instead of selling it. Talk to us about your portfolio before you switch, so the note side is set up the way you account for it.