Missouri Monthly Sales Report With No Sales in the Period

The Missouri dealers monthly sales report produces two separate outputs — the Form 385 document and a plain text sales file for upload — and they behave differently in a month with no qualifying sales. The document prints; the text file reports an error instead. This article explains what to expect and what the messages mean.

Questions this answers

• "For a month where we genuinely had zero vehicle sales, the Missouri sales report file gives me an error instead of just producing an empty file. Is that a bug on your end?"

This article is only about the Missouri monthly sales outputs. Other state filings behave differently and are covered by their own articles.

What happens in a month with no sales

The two outputs handle an empty period in two different ways:

• The Form 385 document generates normally. Rather than printing a blank page, it produces the form with a single row reading NO SALES — the standard way to file a month in which nothing was sold.
• The plain text sales file does not generate. Instead you get the message No records found for the selected period.

That difference is why it looks like something is broken: the same report, run for the same month, gives you one usable output and one error.

What to do

For a genuinely empty month, use the Form 385 document with its NO SALES row. That is the output intended to be filed, and it is complete on its own — there is no empty text file to produce alongside it.

Before concluding the month really was empty, it is worth checking two things:

• The reporting month and year selected on the screen. A month chosen one off from the one you meant is by far the most common cause of an unexpectedly empty period.
• Whether the sales in that month qualify for this filing. A month with activity in DeskManager Online can still contain nothing that belongs on this particular report.

A different message about the license number

If instead of the no-records message you are told to add the license number for the current lot in the lot settings, that is a separate problem and nothing to do with whether you had sales. The text file is named using your dealer license number, so it cannot be produced until that number is filled in on the lot.

Add the license number to the lot's settings and run the file again. Note that you may need someone with settings access to do this for you.

Filing requirements are set by the state of Missouri and can change. This article describes what the software produces; confirm what your dealership is required to submit, and in what form, with the relevant Missouri agency.