Acquisition Target Planner for Used-Car Departments
Work out your days supply, your stocking target, and how many units you have to source this month that aren't already coming from trades.
By Frederic Duprat, founder of Clutched · Updated August 2026
Everything you own, including units still in recon.
Trailing 30 to 90 day average, not your best month.
30 to 45 is the range most independent stores aim for.
A commonly used industry target is 30 to 45 days. A faster-turning store carries less. A rural store with a wider draw usually carries more. Set it consciously rather than accepting a default.
Trades and service-lane buys you already reliably capture.
Acquisition to front-line ready.
Units in recon are owned but not sellable. The planner accounts for this in your effective supply.
Source this month
40 units
45 replacement − 5 because you're overstocked
Sourcing shortfall
28 units with no source yet
40 needed − 12 from trades
That's about 6 per week.
Current days supply
On target43.3 days
65 units ÷ 1.5 sold per day
Effective days supply
35.3 days
Excludes roughly 12 units tied up in recon. This is the number your sales floor actually has to sell.
Target inventory
60 units
40 target days × 1.5 sold per day
By price band
| Band | In stock | Sold/mo | Days supply | Target | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Under $15,000 | 25 | 20 | 37.5 | 27 | +2 |
| $15,000 to $30,000 | 30 | 20 | 45.0 | 27 | -3 |
| Over $30,000 | 10 | 5 | 60.0 | 7 | -3 |
A store on target overall can be badly wrong in every individual band. This is usually where the real signal is.
You have a number. Now it needs a source.
The shortfall above is the gap between what your trades bring in and what your sales pace demands. Most independent stores close it at auction. Clutched closes part of it from the traffic you already have, by putting a real-time valuation tool on your site and texting every seller back within minutes.
No sales call. Two minutes.
How to calculate days supply for a used car lot
The formula is plain: units in stock divided by average daily sales rate over a trailing 30 to 90 day window. If you have 65 units in stock and you sell 45 a month, your daily rate is 1.5 units a day, and your days supply is 65 divided by 1.5, or 43.3 days.
The trailing window matters more than last month in isolation. A single best month distorts the whole plan, because it inflates your daily rate, shrinks your apparent days supply, and tells you to buy fewer units than you actually need. A single slow month does the opposite. Averaging across 60 or 90 days smooths both out and gives you a rate that reflects how the store actually performs, not how it performed once.
Why your sourcing number is bigger than your sales number
This is the point most stocking plans miss. You have to replace what you sold and close the gap to target at the same time. A store selling 45 a month while sitting 15 units under target needs 60 units this month, not 45. The 45 keeps you even. The 15 gets you back to where you want to be.
It compounds, because an understocked store sells fewer units next month. Fewer sales lower the daily rate, which makes days supply look healthier than it is, which tells you to buy even less. The problem hides itself in the math. The fix is to source against the target, not against last month's sales, and to watch effective days supply rather than the raw number.
Segment by price band or the average will lie to you
An overall days supply on target can conceal a badly overstocked band and a starved one. A store at 40 days overall might be at 90 days over $30,000 and at 18 days under $15,000. The overall number says everything is fine while the lot is simultaneously drowning in one band and empty in another.
The fix is to run the same days supply math per price band. When one band is over and another is under, the average is not your plan, it is the thing your plan has to correct. Most of the real signal in a stocking review lives in the bands, not in the total.
Recon is inventory you own but cannot sell
Effective days supply subtracts the units tied up in recon from your stock before dividing by your daily rate. Units in the shop are on the floorplan, depreciating, and unavailable to the sales floor. A store with a long recon cycle is carrying a supply number that is not real.
Shortening recon raises effective supply without buying a single additional car. If your average recon is 8 days and you sell 1.5 units a day, roughly 12 units are locked up at any moment. Cutting recon to 5 days frees 4 or 5 of them. That is inventory you already paid for, made sellable, with no acquisition cost attached.
What this planner does not know
It does not know your local demand curve, your seasonality, your floorplan ceiling, or whether the units you want are available in your market at a price that works. It assumes the sales rate and target you entered are realistic for the period ahead.
A stocking target is a plan, not a purchase order. It tells you how many units you need and how many you have to source. It does not tell you which units, what to pay, or where they will come from. Use it to size the gap, then use the rest of your process to fill it.