A recycler called me recently. He had let go of one of the people responsible for cores and wanted to know how his program looked. It took me about 30 seconds of looking at his invoice history to see something was off: his last box had 150 more parts than his average. Most of them hadn’t been inventoried. They’d just been tossed in.
I didn’t need a forensic audit. I needed averages. Every core buyer sends a settlement statement after your box is checked in, and it holds almost everything you need to know whether your program is healthy. Most owners glance at the check and file the rest. This post is about reading the rest.
Six numbers to track on every box
Put each shipment in a simple spreadsheet, one row per purchase order. Then track these:
| Metric | How to get it | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Core turn rate | Number of boxes shipped per year | How consistent your program is. Consistency is what lets you budget. |
| Invoiced $ | From your invoice | What you expected to be paid. By itself, not much. |
| Paid $ | From the settlement statement | What you actually earned, including parts that weren’t invoiced. |
| Paid % and variance | Paid $ / invoiced $; the gap in dollars and percent | Your grade. 95% and 65% tell very different stories. |
| Number of parts | Parts paid vs. parts invoiced | Uninvoiced extras or missing parts point to a process problem. |
| Average $ per part | Paid $ / number of parts | The root of the analysis. Is the labor worth it? |
Paid % and variance
Everyone understands a grade. Getting paid 95% of what you invoiced means your team is identifying, checking, and packing well. Getting paid 65% means money is being left on the table, and the variance tells you how much. Sometimes you’ll be paid more than you invoiced, if extra parts went in the box or values went up. That’s a nice surprise, but it’s still a sign the invoice and the box don’t match.
Number of parts
Always compare the parts paid to the parts invoiced. If there are 50 extra parts in a box that weren’t on the invoice, I want to know why. Were they never inventoried? Were they pulled without checking value? The count is often the first clue that a process has slipped.
Average $ per part
This is the number I care about most. Based on today’s labor rates, does it make sense to have your staff pull parts worth an average of $3 and ship them halfway across the country? It doesn’t.
I’m an average guy
I’m a big fan of averages. Average all your columns: box value, parts per box, paid %, and value per part. Once you know your averages, an outlier jumps off the page, like that box with 150 extra parts.
In my experience, boxes of 100 to 200 cores typically average $12 to $18 per part. Averages under about $8 per part rarely make sense once you count labor and freight. To raise your average, target higher-value cores and drop the ones under $8.
Averages also reveal what’s working. I visited a self-service yard that was producing very high-dollar core boxes, averaging around $18 per part. It turned out their core technician had mastered dropping K-frames, which gave him access to one of the most valuable cores on the vehicle: the rack and pinion. Their sister location’s boxes were about $500 lighter on average. At a box every 45 days, that gap is roughly $4,000 a year, and closing it was a matter of cross-training.
Read more: Cherry-Pick, Don't Strip: Using the VIN to Pull Cores That Pay
Turn rate: why shipping on a rhythm matters
Are you shipping like clockwork every month, or whenever the box fills up? A steady rhythm produces predictable revenue you can budget from. If your average box brings $3,000 four times a year, that’s $12,000 you can count on for vehicle purchases.
Turn rate is also why I’m careful about splitting cores across too many vendors. Say you fill a $2,000 box every month with one vendor. That’s $24,000 a year. Split the same cores across three small vendors and each box might take three months to fill. Now each vendor gets four boxes a year and the cash sits in your building waiting for boxes to fill. The focus of a core program is turning cash.
There’s nothing wrong with a large-core vendor for engines and transmissions, a small-core vendor, and a local buyer for specific parts. High-volume yards can benefit from two competing vendors. Just watch your turns.
When choosing vendors, consider reputation, technology, the breadth of their parts list, transparency in their settlement reporting, freight terms, payment terms, and customer service.
Get cores onto your P&L
Settlement statements tell you how each box did. Your P&L tells you how much cores matter to the business. In my consulting work, I found most recyclers didn’t use their monthly P&L, usually because it had been patched for years and was unreadable.
Sit down with your accountant and review your chart of accounts. Give cores, converters, scrap, commodities, and recalls their own lines, and group them as non-parts revenue. Once you see it as a percentage of total revenue, you’ll know how much attention it deserves. Most recyclers are surprised by the number.
As Jim Counts used to say: it’s not what you make, it’s what you keep.
Tie incentives to the numbers
Incentives for core work are a great idea, as long as they’re managed. Pay for quantity alone and you’ll get full boxes with low averages and lots of deductions. Instead, base incentives on what actually came back: average value per part and paid %. If a dismantler fills the box quickly but skips the quality checks, it shows up in the yield. Reward quality and everyone makes more money.
Start with your last three boxes
Pull your last three settlement statements and fill in the six numbers. You’ll know your average value per part, your paid %, and your turn rate in about fifteen minutes. That’s your baseline. Everything you change from here, you can measure.
Back to the full guide: Auto Core Competency
Want a second set of eyes on your numbers? Talk to the RAS cores team.
