Counting oil is easy. You have so many litres of so many grades. Counting tyres is a different job altogether, and it is the reason most tyre shop registers in Pakistan are quietly wrong by the end of every month.
If you run a tyre shop and you have ever sold a customer a tyre you were sure you had two of, this one is for you.
The size problem
195/65R15 and 185/65R15 are different tyres. They sit next to each other on the rack, they look identical from six feet away, and on a handwritten register they differ by exactly one digit.
Now multiply that. A shop carrying a normal spread of sizes for Corollas, Civics, Cultuses and the odd Vigo is holding thirty or forty distinct SKUs before you even count brands. Then each size exists in several patterns, and each pattern comes in load and speed ratings that occasionally matter and occasionally do not.
A register column that says "tyre 15 inch, 4 pcs" is not inventory. It is a guess written down neatly.
Why the register drifts
Stock goes out of a tyre shop in more ways than it goes out of most shops:
- Sold and fitted, which somebody writes down
- Fitted as a replacement under warranty, which somebody forgets to write down
- Swapped with the branch across town, which gets written down in one place out of two
- Taken as a spare by a regular who will "settle it later"
- Damaged during fitting
Only the first one reliably makes it into the book. Each of the others is small. Together, over a year, they are the difference between the stock you think you own and the stock on the rack.
Dead stock is invisible until you look for it
Somewhere in your shop there are two or three tyres in a size nobody in your area drives. They were part of a deal. They have been there since the year before last. Nobody notices them because nobody is looking for the thing that is not moving, and cash sitting in a corner on a rack does not announce itself.
This is the single biggest hidden cost in a tyre business, and it is entirely invisible on a paper register. The register tells you what you sold. It never tells you what you did not.
The DOT date nobody checks
Every tyre has a four digit week-and-year code stamped on the sidewall. A tyre that has sat in your shop for four years is still new in the sense that nobody has driven on it, and is not really new in any sense that matters to rubber.
Customers are getting better informed about this, and a knowledgeable one who finds a 2022 tyre on your rack in 2026 will say so, usually loudly, usually in front of other customers. Knowing the age of your own stock is worth it for that reason alone, quite apart from the fact that old stock should be moved on at a discount rather than discovered.
Fitting is a separate business hiding inside the first one
Balancing, alignment, puncture repair, valve replacement, nitrogen. These take time and generate revenue, and in a lot of shops they are either bundled into the tyre price or waved off entirely.
If they are not on the invoice as their own lines, you have no idea what the labour side of your shop earns. Plenty of owners find out, once they start recording it properly, that the fitting bay is carrying a bigger share of the profit than they assumed.
And then there are trade-ins
Used tyres taken in part exchange are stock too. They have a cost, they take space, and they sell. Most shops track them entirely in someone's head, which works right up until that someone is on leave.
What to actually track
You do not need an elaborate system. You need every tyre recorded against five things:
- Full size, written out properly, not rounded to the rim diameter
- Brand and pattern
- Purchase cost, so you know your real margin per sale rather than per shop
- Date it came in, which gives you both ageing and the dead stock answer
- Where it went, including warranty swaps and branch transfers
Do that consistently and the two questions that actually matter become answerable: what is selling fast enough to reorder, and what has been standing there long enough that you should price it to move.
Where software earns its place
Not for the billing. Any system can bill. It earns its place by making the boring entry fast enough that your staff actually do it when the shop is busy, and by answering the dead stock question without anyone having to go and count.
The other thing worth having is the customer side. A tyre is a two to three year purchase, and most shops never contact the buyer again in that window. If you know which vehicle got which tyres and when, a rotation reminder at six months is a genuinely useful message to receive rather than an advertisement, and it brings the car back through your door while the tyres are still yours to look after.
Our tyre shop software page covers how that works in OilShop POS, including size and brand level stock and WhatsApp rotation reminders. If you also do oil changes in the same shop, which plenty of tyre shops do, the POS selection checklist applies equally, and the piece on free software is worth reading before you download anything.
Start with the ageing question though. Walk the rack this week and find the tyres that have been there longest. Most owners are surprised, and it is a free exercise.
