How to review a dealership software renewal

What to check before you decide

Review service. Pull the support tickets from the year.

How many, how fast, and how serious? Note outages and what the vendor did about them.

Ask whether the connections to your DMS and other tools still work, and what they cost.

Check the roadmap against reality. Did the features that mattered at purchase arrive? Are new features included, or sold separately?

Look at the market. Ask two or three competitors for current proposals, using the same scope.

You do not need to switch. The proposals give you facts for negotiation and a view of what is now available.

Model the cost of staying and the cost of leaving. Include price increases, new fees, training and conversion, plus termination terms. A vendor that knows you cannot leave has little reason to improve.

Negotiate several items together: price and increase caps, the term, service commitments, data export rights and any early-exit options.

Put the decision in writing with the reasons. Then diarize the next review so it does not arrive as a surprise again.

Ask the vendor for a written list of every fee and discount currently applied to your account before negotiating, since stores often discover charges for users who left, modules nobody uses or promotional discounts that have quietly expired, and removing them can save more than the headline price reduction a salesperson offers.

Hold the renewal meeting with the people who use the tool every day, not only the owner. They know what is missing and what nobody opens, and their view often changes which features you ask the vendor to commit to.

Share the findings with the vendor before the meeting so that the discussion starts from facts, not impressions, and ask for written answers to each point.