If you are a car dealer still wrestling with Excel, Lexware, and a stack of PDF documents, the next paragraph is for you.
Autaxo is a dealer management system built specifically for independent used car dealers in the DACH region of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Instead of juggling three separate tools for customer relationship management (CRM), accounting preparation, and image editing, you can run your day in one tool: from a mobile.de import through AI document imports and VIES validation for an EU sale to the DATEV export for your tax advisor.
We did not want a 3-minute marketing reel. We wanted to show what a complete dealer workday looks like in Autaxo. That is why we created this 21-minute video manual and this companion article. It highlights the six most important workflows and lets you jump directly to the right minute.
📺 Tip: Watch the entire video or move directly through the chapters. Every workflow below starts the video at the correct point.
What You Will Learn in the Manual
The video is divided into 26 chapters covering a complete dealer workday. Here is the short overview. Every chapter links directly to its point in the video:
The Six Most Important Workflows in Detail
We will now walk through the six chapters that determine 80% of your daily work. Every section includes a clickable thumbnail at the bottom. One click starts the embedded video above at exactly the right point, without taking you away from the page.
1. Document Import: The Most Important Workflow
Document chaos is the most common reason dealership accounting unravels at the end of a quarter. Misplaced a purchase invoice? The vehicle cannot be sold cleanly, and the tax advisor is unhappy. Spending three hours a week sorting documents is entirely normal at many dealerships. This is the workflow Autaxo shortens the most.
How it works: Drag and drop a PDF, or a stack of PDFs, into Autaxo. Carlo, our AI module, reads the supplier, invoice date, gross and net amounts, VIN, and posting text. If the VIN matches a vehicle from your mobile.de import, the document is assigned automatically to the correct vehicle and the status changes to “In Stock.” You no longer need to assign anything manually.
Why it matters: A DMS without document imports is merely a better Excel spreadsheet. The real leverage does not come from displaying documents. It comes from VIN matching, the status update, inventory, and the later DATEV posting forming one continuous chain that you no longer need to sort by hand.
2. VAT-Exempt EU Sale with VIES Lookup
You sell a vehicle to Italy. The buyer is a commercial dealer with a valid VAT ID, so the transaction is a VAT-exempt intra-Community supply. Forget the VIES validation, and you may have to pay the VAT out of your own pocket. Dealers have already suffered four-figure losses this way.
How it works: Enter the VAT ID. Autaxo validates it live with the German Federal Central Tax Office (BZSt) using the qualified confirmation query, obtains the company name and address from the official response, and populates the customer record automatically. The later invoice switches on its own to an “intra-Community supply under Section 6a UStG,” including the correct invoice text, so you do not have to remember the wording.
Why it matters: In a dispute, the BZSt record is the only legally robust evidence that the VAT ID was valid on the date of sale. Without it, the entire sale may be treated as subject to VAT in the worst case, leaving you to explain to your tax advisor why you are paying €5,000 “voluntarily” to the tax authorities.
3. Carlo AI: Your AI Assistant for the Car Trade
It is 10 p.m. You are working through the tax treatment of a sale to Italy, your tax advisor is not answering the phone, and you only want to know whether to use the margin scheme under Section 25a or standard VAT treatment. That is what Carlo is for.
How it works: Carlo is not simply “the chatbot in the corner.” Carlo can do two things. First, it answers technical questions about margin scheme taxation, GoBD, document obligations, and mobile.de specifics using the context of the current vehicle. Second, it can perform actions: “Create the customer Müller GmbH with VAT ID IT123… and make a deal for the BMW M4 at a net price of €54,500.” Carlo does it, with human-in-the-loop confirmation before anything is finalized.
Why it matters: Unlike a standard chatbot, Carlo knows your data. It sees the specific vehicle, knows whether Section 25a is permitted, with the Margin Scheme Check providing additional guidance, knows your master data, and can answer based on it. The response is tailored to your dealership rather than generic.
4. Photo Studio: AI Showrooms for Your Listings
An untidy background in your vehicle photos costs you clicks on mobile.de. But paying a photographer €200 per vehicle to visit the lot does not scale once you sell more than a few cars each month.
How it works: Take phone photos of the vehicle anywhere and in any lighting, then upload them to Autaxo Photo Studio. AI removes the background, corrects lighting and shadows, and places the car in a professional virtual showroom, with your branding if desired. The mobile.de sync runs directly from Autaxo.
Why it matters: mobile.de evaluates listings based on click-through rate. Professional photos measurably improve click-through rate and help the listing rank higher in search results. The process scales across the entire inventory instead of only a few showcase vehicles.
5. DATEV Export in 10 Seconds
It is the end of the quarter, and the tax advisor gets in touch. You need two days to find every document, yet a purchase invoice from the last sale to Italy is still missing. This is when most dealers start thinking about “finally getting a real DMS.”
How it works: The month-end export takes two steps: choose the period and export. Autaxo generates an EXTF CSV in DATEV format, version 700, with every debit and credit posting allocated correctly for Section 25a, standard VAT treatment, intra-Community supplies, and third countries. It also generates a ZIP file with all documents for transfer. Your tax advisor can import both directly into DATEV Kanzlei-Rechnungswesen, DATEV’s accounting software for tax firms.
Why it matters: Accounting logic in the car trade is one of the industry’s most underestimated problems. We wrote a separate article covering the complete DATEV posting logic. Read it if you want to know what happens under the hood. If you simply want the process to work, that is what the export button does.
6. Vehicle Trade Register: A Statutory Obligation, Maintained Automatically
A tax audit is approaching. Have you maintained the vehicle trade register chronologically, in compliance with GoBD, with all required information under Section 29 GewO? If the answer is “um…,” you are not alone.
How it works: Autaxo maintains the vehicle trade register automatically. Every receipt of goods through a vehicle purchase and every dispatch through a vehicle sale is documented with all legally required details: previous owner, date, VIN, and valuation. The monthly export is available as an Excel file, sorted chronologically and ready for audit.
Why it matters: The vehicle trade register is one of the few obligations that businesses almost never maintain actively during daily operations but that receives high priority in a tax audit. Gaps or registers “constructed” after the fact are classic findings. If the data is already in the DMS, the register should not require separate maintenance on the side.
What Else Happens in the Video
We highlighted the six core workflows above, but the video covers much more. If one of the following topics is particularly relevant to you, jump directly to it:
- Set up the mobile.de integration (01:40)
- Configure DATEV master data (02:44)
- Generate proof of arrival for evidence supporting an intra-Community supply (08:55)
- Create a bilingual EU contract (10:14)
- VIN decoder for retrieving vehicle data from the VIN (10:56)
- Universal search across all vehicles, documents, and customers (11:36)
- Customize contract templates (17:10)
Want to See Autaxo for Yourself?
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Choose a Time →Have a specific question but do not want to book a meeting yet? Message us on WhatsApp or call +49 155 65128070, Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. We usually respond within a few hours.
Continue Reading
- 📖 DATEV Exports in the Car Trade: The Complete Posting Logic: what really happens every time you click “Export.”
- 📖 Margin Scheme Taxation under Section 25a UStG: The Complete Guide: when does Section 25a apply, and when do standard VAT rules apply?
- 📖 Why Standard DMS Platforms Fail in the Car Trade, and what a DMS for independent dealers actually needs to do.