Finance & office buying guide

Car Dealer Document Management

Document management for dealerships: Deal jackets, scanning, retention, audit retrieval and workflow.

Deal jackets hold the densest concentration of customer financial information in the store, and dealerships that arrange financing are financial institutions under the FTC Safeguards Rule, which covers paper, electronic and scanned records wherever they sit: the DMS, CRM, email, shared drives, employee laptops and service providers.

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How to choose car dealer document management

Customer information must be securely disposed of no later than two years after it was last used to provide a product or service, unless the store documents a legitimate reason to keep it (a state record-keeping rule, a lender agreement, a litigation hold). So a document system should be judged on retention and disposal as much as on scanning.

Related searches: electronic deal jacket · dealer document archive · scanning workflow

What to check before you buy

Get an answer on how the tool stores scanned jackets and IDs, whether download and printing can be restricted by role, and how it logs every view, and whether retention periods can be set by document type and whether it produces a disposal record when a batch is purged, and what happens to records under a legal hold. Test the search with a real customer's name, a VIN and a deal number, and confirm that a lender or auditor can be given a complete jacket in minutes. Finally, ask how the system connects to the DMS and to eContracting so that the signed contract lands in the same record without scanning.

Plan the back file too. Ask who scans the existing paper, what it costs per box, how each document is indexed so that a jacket can be found by customer, VIN or deal number, and what happens to the paper afterward. For electronic signatures, ask that the audit trail (who signed, when, from what device) be stored with the document, since that trail is what a lender or court will ask for.

Finally, ask whether the tool works on the store's own scanners and phones or requires specific hardware, and what scanning one full deal jacket costs in staff minutes.