Dealer group business intelligence

What to check before you decide

Before choosing a tool, write down the ten numbers the group's leaders review every week and where each one comes from today. Then ask a vendor to reproduce them from your data in the trial, and to show the definition of each: what counts as a sale, how a rooftop on a different DMS is mapped to the same fields, and how a restated figure is handled.

The work that decides whether a dashboard can be trusted is the normalization of chart-of-accounts, department and deal-status fields across systems. Ask who does it, who maintains it when a store is added, and what the group keeps if the contract ends.

Decide early who sees what. A group tool serves a principal who wants one page, a general manager who needs the store's own figures, a fixed-operations director who works by advisor and technician, and an outside party such as a lender or an acquirer who should see only what the group chooses to share.

Ask how roles and store-level permissions are set, whether a manager can see another rooftop's payroll or deal gross, and what the audit trail shows when someone exports a report. Then ask about cadence: whether the figures refresh nightly, hourly or on demand, because a month-end dashboard that arrives a week late changes nothing on the floor, and a tool that shows a different total from the accounting statement will be abandoned within a quarter.

Plan for the store you have not bought yet: ask how long a new rooftop takes to appear in the reports, what the vendor charges for it, and whether a store on a different DMS than the rest of the group is supported or mapped by hand.