It’s often said that cash flow is the lifeblood of a business. By focusing on these tips, you can help keep your dealership’s cash flowing.
Take a customer-centric approach.
By keeping customers in a vehicle longer, you can also secure steady cash flow and support repeat customers as well as referrals. If a dealership is operating on the repossession model, it will take time to develop a focus on customer service.
First of all, the sales process must shift from a focus on getting the car sold to a focus on learning about the customer. For this customer-centric approach to work, the dealer must get buy-in from the entire team. This includes reception, collections, and service teams.
Automate Processes.
Manual processes can be surprisingly expensive. From paper forms and copies to copier ink and toner, you’re looking at significant money out the door every month.
If you haven’t done so already, automate your PO system to save even more time. Tip: Issue a PO for every single expenditure – they most certainly are allowing people to go out to big-box stores and spend money with no approval. The lack of consistency in using PO systems can seriously cost a business.
When you transform the paper trail to an electronic process, you practically eliminate those expenses, plus you also save on purchasing and maintaining printers, copiers and fax machines.
Closely look at the way your business operates.
If only a tiny portion of your business occurs before 10 a.m. or after 6 p.m., consider changing your business hours. Inspect your vendor relationships, and shop for more attractive offers. Just because “I’ve always done it that way,” doesn’t mean you should going forward.
Stay on Top of Accounts Receivable.
Similarly, printing invoices, stuffing envelopes, and waiting for checks to come back 45 days later results in little to no control over cash flow. Use electronic merchant accounts to expedite receivables. Other tips include:
Integrate Advanced Technology for Recoveries.
Reduce time to recovery by using advanced technology such as GPS and license plate recognition. Studies show that reducing the time to recover, reduces damage and limits losses. This means your costs for reconditioning goes down and you reduce the time to remarket.
Equally important to preserving your cashflow is making sure your investment is protected. This is especially true today as interest rates continue to rise and more and more consumers are struggling to make ends meet.
The Advantage interactive dashboard uses advanced technology to deliver high level and vehicle-specific, granular oversight of your automotive finance portfolio.
Our robust line of wired GPS products, includes devices that automatically reads and records vehicle VINs as well devices with unlimited connectivity.
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