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Solution · Finance & accountingReleased the morning after handover; reconciled VIN by VIN every night
Stock financing that agrees with the yard every morning
Robots match every financed VIN to the DMS stock and the sale each night, submit the day's releases to the lender and show the CFO exposure, ageing and interest per car.
Executive summary
Stop paying interest on cars you have already handed over, and stop reconciling the lender's statement by hand.
Mientha designs and delivers a nightly stock-financing reconciliation on the UiPath Platform.
A sold car leaves the financing line the morning after handover, so interest on delivered cars stops being a cost nobody notices.
lender channels (release requests); SharePoint evidence library; Power BI semantic model
Business problem
Stock finance
A dealer group does not own most of the cars in its yards outright. New cars sit on a financing line from the importer's bank from the day they leave the compound; used cars, demo cars and the stock of a brand whose importer has no bank of its own sit on a second lender's line. Every car carries interest per VIN per day until the lender is told it has been sold and settles it; the terms say how soon after the sale that must happen, when part of the principal falls due on an ageing car, and how often the yard may be counted.
Three things go wrong between those terms and daily life. A car handed over on Tuesday keeps accruing interest until somebody at the site tells finance and finance tells the lender. A used car bought in spring and unsold in autumn has quietly cost a slice of its expected margin, and the person pricing it this week has never seen that figure. And when the lender's auditor counts the yard, the statement and the cars disagree by a dozen VINs: two on demo, three transferred, one sold on a deposit, one nobody can place.
The CFO sees exposure once a month and a difference at every audit; the used-car director's ageing list never shows interest; the accountant holds the only workbook in which two lenders' statements meet three DMS instances, and every site or lender added multiplies the formats.
How it works today
- PersonSite administrators email finance the VINs of cars handed over; the group accountant keys the sale date per VIN into each lender's portal, requests the release and files the confirmation email in a personal folder
- WaitingReleases are batched on Tuesdays and Fridays; a car handed over on Wednesday is released the following Tuesday, and every day between is interest
- SystemEach lender's monthly statement and interest invoice arrive as a PDF or a CSV and are matched to a DMS stock export in a workbook, VIN by VIN
- Risk of errorCars on demo, on transfer, invoiced but not handed over, or drawn down late fall out of the match and are carried forward; no list shows the interest paid per car
- WaitingThe lender's stock check finds a car on the line for 200 days and a dozen VINs it cannot see; the reconciliation takes the accountant and two site administrators a week of emails and yard photographs
Why the current process costs more than it appears
The bill that never reaches the budget.
- Interest on sold cars is the cleanest waste in the business: every day between handover and release is paid to a lender for a car that belongs to a customer, hidden in one interest line per lender per month.
- Ageing is priced by the calendar, not by cost. A used car at 200 days has cost interest that would have justified a price cut in month three; without a per-car figure, the cut comes at the audit.
- Audit differences cost a week each, and a pattern of them is what a lender looks at when it reviews the line.
Cost of inaction
Four days on one car is a rounding error; four days on every car the group sells in a year is the second row, paid to a lender for stock that already belongs to customers. The inputs are ours: 320 cars a month at an average financed value of €28,000, an assumed 7% annual cost of the line and four days between handover and release give about €6,900 a month. The third row is a snapshot: sixty cars over 180 days that stay another quarter cost about €29,000 on the same assumptions.
What the table cannot price is the lender's view: a group that explains a dozen VINs by email after every stock check and settles sold cars late is reviewed on that record when the line is renewed. And while the register stays in one workbook, a week of the accountant's absence is a week of interest on every car handed over in it.
A plausible organisation with realistic proportions. The figures are there to be recalculated on your data; they are not a client result.
A Polish dealer group: four brands, seven sites with showroom and authorised workshop, about 520 employees, three DMS instances, Microsoft 365 E3, a finance team of nine. The importer's bank finances three brands' new cars; used cars, demo cars and the fourth brand sit on a second lender's line.
1,150 financed vehicles at any time, roughly 780 new and 370 used and demo; 320 releases a month; 90 reconciliation exceptions a month (VINs on which statement, DMS and yard disagree).
Handover lists emailed to finance, releases keyed into two portals twice a week, statements matched to a DMS export in a workbook monthly, the lender's stock check reconciled by email and photograph afterwards.
About 14 minutes of desk work per release or exception; two to five days between handover and release; ageing seen at the audit; partial repayments discovered on the statement.
A nightly VIN-by-VIN match of DMS stock and sales events against both lenders' positions; releases for yesterday's handovers submitted and filed; exceptions in each site's Teams channel; exposure, ageing and interest per car in a Power BI tab.
In the modelled case a car is released the morning after handover, the reconciliation becomes nightly with a handful of exceptions per site, the audit is answered from a register, and the used-car director prices each car knowing what it has cost; a model, not a client's result.
Proposed solution
Mientha designs and delivers a nightly stock-financing reconciliation on the UiPath Platform; Microsoft Teams and Power BI on your own tenant are the only surfaces people see. Each night robots read stock and sales events from every DMS instance, the financed positions from each lender (a statement file where provided, the portal with a technical user where not) and a rules workbook on SharePoint with the release trigger, the lender terms and the expected margin by brand and age band.
The matching engine puts every VIN in exactly one bucket: financed and in stock, sold and not yet released, financed but not in stock, in stock and not financed, or released and still on the statement. Each car carries its days on the line, the interest billed so far (or a modelled accrual), the next date on which the terms require money and its expected margin; a car whose interest has passed the workbook's share of that margin is flagged for the Monday review.
Releases follow the group's rule, not the robot's judgement. A car that meets the trigger, for instance invoice paid in full and handover recorded, is submitted to the lender the next morning and the confirmation is filed against the VIN in a SharePoint library; a deposit-only sale or a buyer's finance still pending becomes a task for the finance director. The robot never initiates a payment, and no language model is involved: every step is a lookup, a comparison or a rule.
UiPath Orchestrator time triggers, queues and the Azure Key Vault credential store; UiPath unattended Robots; UiPath Integration Service connectors for Microsoft Teams and Microsoft OneDrive & SharePoint; UiPath Action Center actionable notifications in Microsoft Teams; Power BI semantic model, data alerts and report tab in Teams
The DMS and lender readers, the matching engine, the release rules and task routing, the interest and margin arithmetic, the evidence library, the morning card, the Power BI report and the runbook
Each DMS through the route its vendor offers (report export, database view or API); each lender's channel for positions and releases (file or API where offered, portal automation otherwise), confirmed in discovery and subject to the lender's terms
How the automated process works
- AutomationAt 23:00 on working days an Orchestrator time trigger starts the run, one queue item per financed VIN
- SystemRobots read stock, invoices, handovers and registrations from the three DMS instances and collect positions and any new statement from each lender's channel
- AutomationThe matching engine sorts every VIN into its bucket and computes days on the line, interest to date, the next repayment date and the margin flag
- AutomationRelease requests for cars that met the trigger yesterday go to each lender; the confirmation is filed against the VIN, and at 07:00 a card in each site's Teams channel lists releases, decisions waiting and exceptions by bucket
- PersonThe site administrator closes each exception as an Action Center task in Teams with the evidence attached; the finance director decides releases outside the rule
- PersonOn Monday the CFO, the used-car director and the site directors open the Power BI tab: exposure by lender and site, ageing bands, cars past the margin threshold, repayments due in the next 14 days
Human-in-the-loop model
Automation handles
- Nightly collection of stock, sales events and lender positions, with a "not received" flag when a source fails
- VIN matching, buckets, interest to date, ageing bands, repayment dates and the margin flag
- Release requests for cars that meet the group's trigger, confirmation filing and the morning card per site
People decide
- Whether a mismatched VIN is where it should be, and what evidence closes it
- Releases outside the rule: deposit-only sales, buyer finance pending, cars invoiced to another group company
- Prices, transfers and buy-outs for ageing cars, the margin threshold, and the release trigger itself
Before and after
Systems and integrations
Every entry can be checked in vendor documentation. The evidence class is stated next to each one.
Inputs
- three DMS instances (stock, invoices, handovers, registrations)
- two lender channels (positions, statements, interest invoices)
- rules workbook on SharePoint (release trigger, lender terms, margin bands)
Automation layer
- UiPath Orchestrator
- UiPath unattended Robots
- UiPath Integration Service
- UiPath Action Center
Target systems
- lender channels (release requests)
- SharePoint evidence library
- Power BI semantic model
Human touchpoints: morning card per site in Microsoft Teams; Action Center tasks in Teams; Power BI tab for the Monday review; data alerts
Technologies used
nightly time trigger, one queue item per VIN, retries, Azure Key Vault credentials, audit
Aposts the morning card per site; files confirmations to the evidence library; reads the rules workbook
Aexception and release-decision tasks completed inside Teams
Aexposure, ageing and interest report as a Teams tab; scheduled refresh; data alerts
Astock, invoices, handovers, registrations, read through the route each vendor offers
Cpositions, statements, interest invoices; release submission and confirmation
CIllustrative economic model
The arithmetic is open, so it can be argued with.
Interest has its own arithmetic further down; the calculator prices desk work only. The 410 items a month are 320 releases plus 90 reconciliation exceptions, priced alike because the same two people work both: finding the car and the sale in the DMS, keying the release into a portal, or chasing one VIN the statement shows and the yard does not. Fourteen minutes per item and €26 an hour fully loaded for a site administrator or group accountant are illustrative, not measured at a client.
Run the numbers on your data
An illustrative estimate from your own inputs. It models released capacity; it is not a promise of savings.
Business benefits
- A sold car leaves the financing line the morning after handover, so interest on delivered cars stops being a cost nobody notices
- The lender's statement and the yard agree every night, VIN by VIN; an audit difference becomes a list with evidence, not a week of emails
- Interest to date sits beside every car on the ageing list, so a price is cut on what the car has cost, not on how long it has stood
- Partial repayments appear 14 days ahead, and an eighth site or a third lender is configuration in the same rule set
The management view
- Exposure by lender and by site every morning, from the register the releases are made from
- Days from handover to release become a measured number per site, and site directors see their own
- Every release carries its trigger, confirmation and timestamp; every exception carries who closed it and with what evidence
Board-level KPIs
Security and governance
An auditor should be able to reconstruct every decision.
- Lender access covers reading positions and statements and submitting release requests; the technical user holds no payment or drawdown rights, and settlement stays with treasury under existing approvals
- DMS access is read-only through dedicated technical users; portal and database secrets live in Azure Key Vault and reach a robot only through the Orchestrator credential store; every job and retry is logged
- Robots run in the EU region of UiPath Automation Cloud or on your own virtual machines; the evidence library and report stay in your Microsoft 365 tenant, hold VIN, invoice number and dates rather than customer names, and are scoped per site through Microsoft Entra ID groups; rule changes are versioned and approved by the CFO
Why now
Stock-financing lines are priced off a reference rate plus a margin, so each day between handover and release has a price the ledger never shows per car; in the modelled case the lag alone is about €6,900 a month
More cars are moving through the same yards and lines: 597.4 thousand new passenger cars were registered in Poland in 2025, 8.3% more than in 2024 (PZPM/KPMG quarterly report, 3 February 2026), each one another VIN to release
The building blocks are verified and mostly licensed: Orchestrator time triggers, the Azure Key Vault credential store, Action Center tasks inside Teams, Power BI as a Teams tab with alerts; on Microsoft 365 E3 only Power BI Pro and robot runtimes are added
Relevant executive roles
Exposure, lag and interest per car become daily numbers with a register behind them, and the lender's stock check is answered from it rather than from a week of emails.
Every car on the ageing list shows what it has cost so far, so the price decision is taken in month three, not at the audit in month seven.
The morning card shows the site's own exceptions with the evidence to close them, and the audit report is signed on a reconciliation nobody had to rebuild.
Common questions and objections
Most of the input is statements delivered as files. Where positions or releases exist only in a portal, a robot with a technical user works it as your accountant does, if the lender's terms allow; we confirm that per lender in discovery.
The DMS knows what you hold, not what the lender believes it is financing, and neither knows on its own that a car handed over yesterday is still on the statement today. The value is the nightly match per VIN across both.
The trigger is your policy, written in the workbook and approved by the CFO. A car that misses any part of it becomes a task for the finance director, and the robot never initiates a payment.
When this is not the right solution
- One site, one lender and a few hundred financed cars, where the lender's portal report and a disciplined weekly routine give the same answer for less
- Handovers are recorded in the DMS days late or not at all; the robot can only release what the DMS says was delivered, so handover discipline comes first
A question for the next management meeting
Somewhere in our yards stands the car that has cost us the most interest this year: who can name it, does its price reflect that, and how many of last month's handovers were still on a lender's statement a week later?
Implementation approach
Delivery runs in stages, so it can be stopped at any point.
We deliver
- The financing map: lenders, lines and terms, statement channels, the release trigger the group actually applies, the accountant's unwritten rules
- Readers per DMS instance and lender channel, on files or APIs first, on portal automation only where nothing else exists
- The matching engine, the arithmetic and the release rules, tested on three months of your statements and stock exports
- The morning card, the Action Center tasks in Teams, the evidence library and the Power BI report with its alerts
- Runbook, Orchestrator monitoring and hand-over, including how to add a lender or a site
We need from you
- Three months of statements and interest invoices per lender, with matching DMS stock exports and release confirmations
- The operative terms of each financing agreement: settlement window after sale, partial repayments by age, audit rights
- Read-only technical users per DMS and, subject to the lender's terms, per portal; the group accountant as process owner
Stages
Discovery and design
Financing map, data routes, buckets, release trigger, card and report layout, access model
Build
Readers, matching engine, release submission, evidence library, Teams touchpoints, Power BI report
Validation
Parallel run against the accountant's workbook for one statement cycle; every difference explained
Go-live and optimisation
Releases live per lender under supervision; thresholds tuned on the first quarter
Departmental. Effort follows the number of DMS instances and lenders, whether each offers files or only a portal, and how reliably sites record handovers on the day.
Sold on Tuesday, released on Friday, and the interest in between is yours.
Send us one lender statement and the same day's stock export from one site. We return the VIN-by-VIN match, the bucket of each difference and what four days of late releases cost at your rate.
Put a number on last month's late releasesThe neighbouring process usually has the same problem
Four DMS, four importer portals and nine sites, and the board sees last month in the third week of this one.
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View solutionIndustries we deliver this in most oftenAutomotive retail