Purchase Inventory on Floorplan

Interesting, I hadn’t heard the term before. It sounds similar to selling on consignment, but for new items rather than used.

The main difference is ownership.  With consignment (which I have seen done on new items as well), the ownership doesn’t transfer to the company performing the sale and there’s no financing involved.  With Floorplan, the equipment is sold by the vendor to us, but typically through a third party finance company.  The vendor pays the finance company interest through the Floorplan period (we refer to it as through “End of free”), and then after end of free, we as the distributor have to start paying interest (or just pay off the balance with the finance company.

It’s a cash juggling game common in heavy equipment and automotive sales.  The distributor or dealer can’t front the hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars for inventory immediately, especially if configuration time is required, and floorplan allows us to get the material and ultimately sell it (and collect money from customers) that we then use to pay for the equipment.

We’re hoping to find other Acumatica customers that deal with Floorplan to try to come up with some best practices.  We have a solution that works pretty well, but we had to develop it ourselves as no ERP we looked at had native support.

Thanks for the explanation!

Hopefully you find others in your boat, should make for an interesting thread.

This just came up for us with one of our largest suppliers of equipment.  We are looking for a way to track the inventory and alert someone when it is either sold or moved to our rental fleet.  At those times we owe the supplier their money for that piece of equipment.

I would be interested if anyone has a way they are tracking this inventory.  Ours is serialized equipment, so knowing which serial number is “sold” is important.

I’m currently thinking of creating an attribute for “Floor Plan” and tracking all items on hand with that attribute checked.  If a serial number drops off a GI, then an email is sent.

We have a series of Serialized Attributes that we are using to track when an item is sold, and those attributes then trigger other events to make the invoice due immediately.  I’ve Cliffs Notes it below, but I’m happy to have a bigger discussion on it if you’d like:

• The process starts at AP, because we get the invoices before we receive the material.  Our vendor issues a unique loan ID for each item we purchase, which makes it very easy to enter a separate invoice per item rather than have to deal with pay by line.  We have attributes on the AP Bill for the type of Floor Plan invoice (serialized or non serialized), the SKU, the serial (when applicable), and then for later, the customer invoice that the item was sold on.  The due date loaded on the bills is the “end of free” date (when we have to pay for it whether it sells or not).
• We have attributes on the serialized items that track similar details (the loan ID, end of free date, customer invoice the item is sold on, etc.)  We also have an attribute for Owned status to easily report on items that we may have paid for but still have in stock--these are the highest priority serials to get out the door.
• An import scenario runs nightly that looks for inventory issues with AR Invoices for serials and, when applicable, the serial attributes are updated with sold date, AR Invoice #, etc.  There’s a separate one that looks for the reverse in case something was sold and then returned (unfortunately we’ve typically paid for it at this point).  
• Another import scenario updates the Due Date on the AP Bills (along with tagging the description with “-SOLD-” and filling in the customer invoice attribute) to the current date so that anything that is sold is due immediately.
• A filter tab in Prepare Payments filters to anything with “-SOLD-” in the AP Bill description for quick sold payment processing.