Bookkeeping for Boat & Yacht Dealers
A boat dealership is a floating car lot with worse margins on the metal and better margins everywhere else. If your books can't tell you what the units, the brokerage, the F&I, and the service department each earn, you're flying blind on an expensive vessel.
Floor-plan financing is the number that can sink you
You finance your inventory — floor-plan (or flooring) — and that debt quietly accrues interest and demands curtailments while your units sit on the showroom floor looking gorgeous and doing nothing. A yacht that lingers isn't just unsold; it's costing you money every day it stays. Books that don't track floor-plan interest and curtailments per unit are hiding your single biggest cash risk.
Clean books tie the financing to the units, so you know your real carrying cost and can tell the difference between a healthy inventory and a very pretty liability.
The metal is the least of your margins
New-unit margins are thin. The money is in the other departments — used and brokerage, finance and insurance, parts, and service — and blending them into one dealership number tells you nothing useful. Brokerage commissions, trade-ins (some of which are really projects wearing a boat costume), and F&I income each need their own accounting.
We split the departments so you can see where the dealership actually makes its money, price and stock accordingly, and stop letting a strong service department quietly subsidize a soft sales floor.
How Kaizen runs it
We run your books on QuickBooks Online with a dealership-shaped chart of accounts: floor-plan tracked per unit, departments split out, brokerage and F&I accounted for correctly, and the service and parts departments tied in. A documented monthly close produces the same departmental numbers on the same date every month.
We're named after kaizen, continuous improvement — so the reporting sharpens each cycle. And if a bigger group ever comes shopping — marine retail is consolidating — clean, departmental books are worth real money at the table.
What's included
- Floor-plan financing tracked per unit — interest and curtailments
- Unit inventory across new, used, and brokerage
- Department-level P&Ls — sales, F&I, parts, service, brokerage
- Brokerage commissions and trade-ins accounted for correctly
- Finance & insurance (F&I) income tracked distinctly
- Service and parts departments reconciled and job-costed
- Sales and use tax handled across units, parts, and service
- Bank and credit-card reconciliations plus a monthly data-quality scan
Pricing
Straight answers
Do you handle floor-plan / flooring financing?
Yes — tracked per unit, with interest and curtailments, because it's your biggest carrying cost and your biggest cash risk. Books that don't track it per unit are hiding the number most likely to hurt you.
Can you give us department-level P&Ls?
That's the core of it. Sales, F&I, parts, service, and brokerage each earn differently; splitting them shows you where the dealership actually makes money instead of one blended number that hides a soft sales floor.
How do you treat brokerage and trade-ins?
Brokerage commissions and F&I income get their own accounting, and trade-ins are valued honestly — some are inventory, some are really reconditioning projects. Both belong on the books at what they'll actually cost or fetch.
We're a small single-brand dealer. Do we need this?
Maybe not yet. A small dealer with light inventory and a good bookkeeper can manage. This earns its keep once floor-plan, multiple departments, and brokerage turn the books into something worth getting wrong.
Related
Free 20-minute books assessment
We'll show you the five things we'd fix first in your books — useful whether you hire us, hire someone, or do neither.
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