A Monthly Inventory Audit Using PostToMarket Statuses

Most inventory audits start in the DMS and never look at what the public can actually see. The used-car manager prints aged stock, walks the lot, and argues about pricing. None of that tells you whether last month's buys were drafted and abandoned, whether failed posts were ignored, or whether sold cars are still sitting in posted. Statuses are already an audit. A monthly inventory audit using PostToMarket statuses is the habit of reading those five states as a coverage report, then reconciling them to the cars on the ground.

The five statuses are simple: draft, posting, posted, sold, failed. Read one at a time and they look like software. Read them together and they answer the only question a GM should ask about Marketplace operations: of the units we intended to retail this month, which ones were advertised, which ones stalled, and which ones we pretended were done?

This article is a once-a-month procedure for used-car managers and general managers. It is not a financial audit and not a substitute for your DMS. It is a posting-coverage audit. Do it on the same week as month-end so the numbers you put in a recap are the numbers the floor lived with.

What a Monthly Inventory Audit Using Statuses Is For

You are looking for mismatches, not for a pretty dashboard. A healthy store will still have drafts (cars in recon) and failed (a listing that needs a retry). An unhealthy store will have those same words meaning "we lost track."

The five statuses as audit categories

What this audit is not

It is not a ranking of who posted the most. Volume without status quality is a vanity number. Pair this audit with the definitions in Marketplace posting KPIs for general managers if you need store-level metrics. Here, the unit of work is the vehicle record, not the rep.

It also does not prove Facebook distributed every posted listing. Posted means your workflow completed a listing. Reach is a separate question, and no tool can guarantee it.

How to Run a Monthly Inventory Audit Using Statuses

Block 45 minutes. Bring the used-car manager and whoever owns posting. Do not invite the whole floor. You will produce a short exception list, not a slideshow.

1. Count each status

Write five numbers. That is the snapshot. You cannot manage what you only glance at. Compare to last month's five numbers if you saved them. A draft count that grew while posted stayed flat is the classic "we imported and never queued" pattern.

2. Age the drafts

Inside draft, sort oldest first. Anything older than seven days needs a reason in this meeting. Recurring reasons (photos, price, recon) are process problems. One-off reasons (a specific title delay) are inventory problems. Process problems get an owner for next month, not another shrug.

3. Inspect failed as if it were aged stock

Failed is unpublished inventory with extra information: something already went wrong. For each failed VIN still on the lot, decide fix-and-retry or stop-advertising. "We'll look later" is how failed becomes a junk drawer. If the unit is gone, it should not still be failed; it should be sold and archived.

4. Sample posted against the lot

You do not need to walk every posted unit. Sample:

• Newest posted: are they actually on the lot and priced as listed?
• Oldest posted: are they still available, or quietly sold / wholesaled?
• A handful of mid-age units in your bread-and-butter segment.

Mismatches go on the exception list: wrong price, wrong photos, sold-but-posted, posted-but-in-body.

5. Reconcile sold to the desk

You will not match to the penny. You want directional agreement. If the desk sold 40 retail units and PostToMarket sold-status is 12, your mark-as-sold habit is broken. If PostToMarket sold-status is 40 and the desk sold 22, you are marking sold too early (pending deals) or you never returned fall-throughs to stock.

6. Look at posting (in-flight) last

A few units in posting during a workday is normal. A graveyard of posting with no one at a browser is a stuck session or a claim nobody released. Use the team queue view, not a guess.

A daily, lighter version of steps 2–4 is using statuses to build a daily exception list. The monthly audit is where you catch patterns those daily lists keep repeating.

Exception List: What to Do With Each Finding

An audit that produces observations and no assignments is a conversation. Write VIN, status, problem, owner, due date.

Draft exceptions

• Verify and queue this week.
• Hold with a dated recon or title reason.
• Archive if the unit already left and was never marked sold.

Failed exceptions

• Correct the record (VIN, photos, price, copy) and retry.
• If the failure is environmental (session, browser) and the data is fine, retry on a known-good setup.
• If you have chosen not to advertise the unit, take it out of the failed working set so it stops looking like open work.

Posted exceptions

• Mark sold and archive if the car is gone.
• Fix the listing if the car is here but the data is wrong.
• Refresh photos or copy if the unit is aged and still yours; do not confuse that with a status change.

Sold exceptions

• Fall-through still marked sold: return it to draft or posted as appropriate.
• Sold in DMS, still posted in PostToMarket: mark sold now, then look at why the daily habit missed it.

Queue exceptions that statuses reveal

A posted or draft unit that is claimed by a rep who left last week is an ownership exception. Release the claim. Status told you the car still exists; the team view tells you the person does not.

Illustrative Month: What the Five Numbers Can Mean

Consider a lot with 80 retail units intended for Marketplace.

• 11 draft, 2 of them older than 14 days (photo backlog on dark-colored cars).
• 3 posting (today's queue, acceptable).
• 58 posted.
• 6 failed, all from one import file with blank prices that were queued anyway.
• Sold-status this month is far below the desk's retail sold count.

The story is not "we posted 58, good job." The story is: coverage is incomplete (11+6 unpublished), import QA failed, and sold-unit hygiene is leaking. Next month's audit should show fewer aged drafts, fewer failed from the same cause, and sold-status closer to the desk. If it does not, the SOP is decoration.

Do not turn these illustrative counts into targets you copy onto a bonus sheet. Your lot's mix, recon speed, and conservative daily post limits will produce different shapes. The value is the comparison to your last month, plus the exception list.

How PostToMarket Automates This

A monthly inventory audit only works if every vehicle has one status the whole store sees, and if managers can move from a filter to an assignment without exporting a private spreadsheet. PostToMarket's inventory statuses are the audit categories. The rest of the product is how you fix what the audit finds.

One status per vehicle, visible to the team

• Inventory statuses: draft, posting, posted, sold, failed.
• Mark as sold and archive from inventory or the queue when posted-vs-sold is the finding.
• Team queue view to see and release claims that explain a stuck posting or draft.

Fix the data the audit flags

• Bulk CSV and Excel import with import history and a row-level error log, so the "blank price, then failed" pattern is caught at upload next month.
• Capture from auction and wholesale sites into draft, which should appear in the draft aging bucket until verified.
• AI-generated titles and descriptions, editable before posting, so a posted sample with templated copy can be rewritten without retyping specs.
• Facebook photo picker when the posted sample fails because the lead image is the wrong unit.

Turn exceptions into next week's work

• Managers assign vehicles to associate queues; sales reps self-queue from shared inventory.
• Personal posting queues and the mobile dashboard so assigned fixes actually get done on the lot.
• Team analytics (posting analytics by rep and source) as a second lens after the status counts: who posted, from import vs capture vs manual.
• Chrome extension posts one vehicle at a time with human-like delays and server-enforced daily limits, so the retry list does not become a burst that creates new problems.

Save the five counts. The automation is not a magic audit report. It is a trustworthy status on every VIN so a human audit takes 45 minutes instead of a day of reconciling chats.

Audit Coverage Monthly, Not by Memory

If you only look at how many listings went out, you will miss the drafts that never moved, the failed that never retried, and the sold that never left posted. Run a monthly inventory audit using PostToMarket statuses. Count five numbers, age the drafts, sample posted against the lot, and leave with named exceptions.

PostToMarket keeps those statuses on unlimited inventory, with queues, import error logs, and mark-as-sold so the audit is actionable. Starter is $59 per month for a solo operator who still needs to see draft versus posted versus failed. Dealership is $299 per month for up to 13 logins, so the GM and used-car manager can run this pass on the same data the floor uses.

Start your 10-day free trial through secure Stripe checkout. After a couple of weeks of real posting, run this audit once before you decide anything about volume. Cancel anytime. For help reading statuses, write info@posttomarket.com.