The spares invoice nobody reads

Ask anyone in a dealership who reads the parts invoices and you'll get the same answer: accounts. Ask accounts and they'll tell you, honestly, that they match the total to the job and file it. Nobody reads the lines. There are too many of them and they all look the same.

That's how a spares bill grows. Not through one big overcharge but through a thousand small ones: the same brake pads at three prices from three suppliers, a return that never got credited, a part that was billed but never fitted. A few percent a year, and nobody decided it should happen.

We built an agent to read every invoice, every line, and compare each part against what we paid last time and what the other suppliers charge for the same thing. It flags what looks wrong and drafts the credit request. It doesn't send anything; a person does that. Last month it read 1,879 invoices. No person in our business was ever going to do that.

Over twelve months the spares bill fell by 48%. I want to be careful about that number. Some of it is credits we'd never have claimed. Some of it is suppliers sharpening up once they realised someone was looking. Some of it is us simply buying from the right supplier for each part, which we'd always meant to do. It isn't magic. It's reading.

The thing I didn't expect is how much the suppliers' behaviour changed once they knew. A supplier who knows every line is checked prices differently from one who knows it isn't. That alone would have paid for the agent.

If you do nothing else, forward your parts invoices to something that reads them.

George Manning is the founder of OmegAi and a dealer principal who runs a UK car supermarket group. About →