How does floor plan financing work for a dealership — and what is curtailment?

Floor plan financing is a revolving line a dealer uses to fund inventory one unit at a time: the lender advances against a car the store acquires, the store carries that unit on the line while it sits, and pays a per-unit interest charge until the car sells or is otherwise disposed. Curtailment is the scheduled principal paydown built into that line — on a set clock, usually tied to how long the unit has been floored, the store must pay down a portion of the original advance whether the car has sold or not. So the three numbers that govern the cost of a floored unit are its floored date (the day it went on the line), its days on line (today minus that date), and its curtailment schedule (when the next principal paydown comes due), and the sum of what remains is the payoff — the figure that clears the unit off the line entirely.

That is the mechanism. The rest of this page is what each of those numbers is, why the aging matters more than most stores watch it, and how the flooring status of a specific unit reads by VIN at floorplan.vin — with the one honest limit stated first: no credit is extended at this address. The line is attested, not originated. floorplan.vin reads the status of a flooring line that already exists; it does not lend, and it does not underwrite. When that changes, the change is stated the same way every number here is — plainly, with its source.

Per-unit financing, not a lump loan

The thing that makes floor plan different from an ordinary business loan is that it is keyed to units, not to a balance. Each car on the lot carries its own advance, its own accrued interest, and its own clock. A store does not owe "the floor plan" a single blended number; it owes a stack of per-unit positions, and each position has a date attached to it. This is why a floored unit is best read the same way the platform reads everything else — at its VIN, as a set of slots, each slot carrying a value, a source, and a timestamp. The floored date is a slot. Days on line is a subtraction from that slot. The curtailment schedule is a slot. The payoff is the sum. Nothing here is an average; every figure traces to a specific unit and a specific date.

Because the financing is per-unit, the cost is per-unit too, and it compounds quietly. A car that read as margin at the lane — bought under the retail band, plenty of spread — loses a little of that spread every day it sits, because the interest accrues daily and the curtailment eventually demands principal back regardless of whether the car moved. The store that watches only its aggregate line balance never sees which specific unit is bleeding. The store that reads by VIN does.

Curtailment: the paydown clock

Curtailment is the part stores underestimate, because it arrives on a calendar rather than on a sale. A typical structure sets curtailment milestones by days on line — a first principal paydown at one aging threshold, a larger one at the next, and so on — so the longer a unit sits, the more of the original advance the store must return out of pocket before the car has produced a dollar. The exact schedule and the exact percentages are set by the store's flooring agreement with its lender; this page does not invent those terms. What it does is read them: where the record carries the curtailment schedule and the next due date for a unit, floorplan.vin posts them by VIN, so the deadline the aging unit is walking toward is legible before the audit or the paydown finds it.

The reason to see it early is arithmetic, not alarm. A unit approaching its second curtailment is a unit whose remaining spread is about to be tested against a cash demand. If the equity is thin, the store would rather clear the unit before that demand than fund principal into a car it is about to wholesale anyway. Reading the curtailment date turns a surprise into a decision.

What reads by VIN — and what does not

At floorplan.vin the flooring face of a unit assembles from the record: floored date, days on line, original advance where the record carries it, curtailment schedule and next due date, accrued fees and interest itemized, and the payoff as the sum that clears the unit. Every figure carries its source and timestamp. A slot the record cannot fill reads a dash — $ — — and says so, rather than an estimate dressed as a number. This is the discipline the whole address is built on: a filled slot is a fact, a dash is an honest absence, and there is nothing in between.

Reading the face costs nothing — floorplan.vin's own fee is $0, every VIN, every visit, no account. And the same sheet a used-car manager reads is the sheet an agent reading the store's line on a Mandate reads: one record, many faces, the same numbers on both sides.

The honest limit, restated so it cannot be missed: this address does not extend credit. It does not floor a unit, set a rate, or originate a line. Origination is a different act at a different address, and floorplan.vin will say so the day one opens. What floorplan.vin does is make the status of an existing line legible per unit — the count while it still costs nothing to read.

From reading the line to clearing it

Reading the payoff is only half a decision; the other half is what the unit is worth. Equity is one subtraction — value minus payoff — and the value side is a rooftop's whole disposition question. To decide whether a floored unit should retail or run the lane, a store reads the auction band beside the retail band and weighs the spread against the aging in days; that disposition analysis lives at wholesale.vin, where the two bands sit side by side with the aging stated. And the full entrance to every rail a store works — appraise, record, dispose, dispatch, all keyed to the unit — is dealers.vin, the rooftop's one door. The line reads here; the clear runs through those.