Its slightly more complex than that. At 'Last Light' every day a Regiment had to tally its tanks and record them in 3 categories
1) 'Fit' meaning fully functioning and ready for use
2) 'Needing repairs' but expected to be fit in under 24 hours. minor damage.
3) Needing major repairs that will take longer than 24 hours plus all tanks known to be destroyed.
The Regiment would strike all of '3' from its books and that tank would be a 'Total Loss' to the Unit and it could get a replacement.
All tanks in '3' would be a Unit total loss but they were not all be destroyed tanks. Those tanks were transferred to the workshops and it was there that they would be examined and a decision made if they could be repaired or had to be written off and scrapped.
Most German 'ace validating' accounts normally uses the last light numbers of a Regiment in order to say 'Kills were confirmed by Allied Unit records' but that is not what they show. If a Unit shows 50 in 'fit', 8 in 'Under 24 hours' and 15 in 'over 24 hours' it does not mean they had 23 tanks destroyed. It means they suffered 23 tank casualties of which 8 were minor repairs and 15 were sent to the rear to see how many were repairable. It is possible(though highly unlikely) that all 15 of the major repair tanks could be fixed and returned to a Unit.
The Commonwealth had a large park of replacement tanks and thus could keep Units pretty much at full strength and the workshops had a large backlog of repairs building up so damaged tanks could spend weeks waiting to be inspected and repaired. Commonwealth 'destroyed tank' totals were not done daily and were complied only a few times during the campaign so they lagged far behind events and are totally useless for working out daily or even monthly losses. Despite Zetterling explaining this in his 2000 'Normandy' book (footnote 33 Chapter 6) people still like to use the last light numbers because they give an inflated count of Allied losses.