Odometric is car showroom management software for used-car dealerships in Lahore and across Pakistan. It tracks the physical document file, the money still owed on a sale and each investor's share against the car's registration number.
The both-parties biometric problem
In Punjab, a transfer of ownership needs both the buyer and the seller present for biometric verification. Not a signature, not an attested copy, not a scan sent on WhatsApp: both people, in person, at the excise office. Processing then runs roughly ten to fifteen working days.
Punjab Excise publishes the current procedure and fee schedule at excise.punjab.gov.pk, including transfer through ePay. Fees and process are revised periodically, so treat any figure here as a starting point and check the official schedule before quoting a customer.
For a private sale between two people this is mildly annoying. For a showroom it is a structural problem, because the seller in your transaction is usually not the person whose name is on the book. You bought the car from someone who has now moved on, and you are selling it to someone who wants it registered in their own name. Getting the original owner back into an excise office, months later, for a car they no longer think about, is the single most reliable way for a Lahore file to go stale.
Why open letters pile up here
The trade's answer is the open letter: the seller signs the transfer documents blank, and the car changes hands physically and financially while the registration stays in their name. It is normal, it is how a very large share of Lahore's volume moves, and it leaves the showroom carrying a legal position it did not intend to hold.
Until that transfer is completed, three things are true at once. The car is not yours. It is not the buyer's either. And any challan, any accident, any tax notice attached to that registration number lands on a person who sold the car through you and will telephone you about it.
A showroom doing thirty cars a month accumulates open letters faster than it clears them, and the ones that go wrong are never the recent ones. They are the file from fourteen months ago, where the buyer has since sold it on, the original owner is unreachable, and nobody can produce the papers because they were in a drawer that has since been reorganised.
The operational requirement is unglamorous: know, at any moment, which registration numbers you are still exposed on, how long each has been outstanding, and where the physical documents for it are. That is a tracking problem, and it is the reason a Lahore showroom outgrows a register faster than one in a smaller market.
Transfer costs, and who is supposed to pay them
Punjab's transfer fee scales with engine capacity, and there are separate line items for the smart card and for biometric verification. A small car is meaningfully cheaper to transfer than a large one, which matters when you are quoting an out-the-door price and absorbing the transfer yourself to close a sale.
The part that causes arguments is not the amount, it is who agreed to pay it. If your quote said "transfer included" and the buyer arrived with a 1800cc car rather than the 1000cc one they first asked about, somebody is losing that difference. Recording the agreed position against the file at the time of sale, rather than reconstructing it afterwards from memory, removes an entire category of dispute.
What Odometric tracks for a Lahore showroom
Odometric is built around the registration number rather than a stock code, because that is the number every Punjab process, every challan and every phone call actually uses. Against it sit the excise book scan, the transfer letter, the CNIC copies and the purchase documents, so producing a file does not depend on remembering which drawer it went into.
Open-letter sales are tracked as an explicit state rather than as a completed sale, so the cars you are still legally exposed on stay visible and ageing, instead of disappearing into last quarter's sales figures. The open letter guidance covers what to keep on file; the costs that vanish from a car's file covers where the money leaks.
The rest is the ordinary business of a used-car showroom: instalment sales where payment arrives over months, and investor splits where the floor is funded by partners who each need their share worked out. Neither is Lahore-specific, but both are more common here simply because the volume is higher.
Common questions
Do I need different software for Lahore than for Karachi?
Not different software, but the process it has to record genuinely differs. Punjab requires both parties at the biometric; Sindh introduced a route that does not require the seller's biometric, with a documented alternative in its place. A system that assumes one province's process will produce the wrong paperwork trail in the other. See the Karachi page for how that differs.
Can software complete a transfer for me?
No, and be wary of anything claiming otherwise. Transfer happens at the excise office with the people and documents the department requires. What software does is make sure you know which transfers are outstanding, how old they are, and that the documents exist when someone finally goes.
We only do fifteen cars a month. Is this overkill?
Possibly. At fifteen cars with short holding periods and few open letters, a well-kept register is genuinely adequate and cheaper. The point where it stops working is usually not volume but the number of files still open from previous months.