1. Start the record at delivery
A contract is not in transit until the car has been delivered. Creating the record at write-up fills the schedule with deals that may never deliver, and the total stops meaning anything.
Create it when the deal delivers, whether or not the bank is known yet. A missing bank on a delivered deal is a smaller problem than a delivered deal missing from the schedule.
2. Separate a claim from a confirmation
Finance may believe a contract funded. Accounting knows when the money lands in the account. Those are two different facts and they belong to two different people.
Give finance and accounting each their own step, and give accounting a way to send a record back when the money did not arrive.
3. Age from the delivery date, in calendar days
Age starts when the contract enters transit, which is delivery. Count calendar days so two contracts delivered on the same day carry the same number whatever time they delivered.
Group contracts into a handful of age bands and work the list oldest first. It is a chase list before it is a report.
4. Report what is untouched separately from what is claimed
If every open contract sits in one total, a schedule where a third of the contracts are already marked funded looks like a crisis. Show untouched dollars apart from claimed-but-unconfirmed dollars, so the number that needs chasing is the number that is untouched.
A clean schedule
- Every financed and lease delivery has a record.
- The amount is the posted figure where you can read it, and typed once where you cannot.
- Nobody retypes the deal log into it.
- Anything past 30 days has a note saying why.