Dealership payments and DMS integration guide

What to check before you decide

Ask about the full life of a payment. Authorization is when the card is approved.

Settlement is when the money arrives. Refunds, voids and chargebacks follow later.

The DMS should reflect each step, and the bank deposit should reconcile to the processor's report. Ask how each is handled and by whom.

Check fees and surcharges. If you add a surcharge to credit cards, where does it appear on the document, and how is it reversed on a refund?

Rules cap surcharges, bar them on debit cards and vary by state. Find out how the system applies them.

Look at security and access. Card data should never be stored in the DMS. Check how tokens are used, who can issue a refund and whether each action is logged with the person's name.

Consider the customer's side. A text-to-pay link should name the store, show the invoice and give a receipt. Ask how a failed payment is retried.

Reconcile in parallel for a month. Compare every deposit to DMS postings, line by line, including fees and refunds. Differences show which cases the connection handles poorly.

Document who owns the connection and who handles an exception at month-end.

Test the awkward cases deliberately, including a partial payment, a split between two cards, a refund after a month-end close and a payment sent to the wrong repair order, since these are the transactions that produce the month-end cleanup and they show quickly whether the connection was built for real stores.