What should a dealership software SLA include?

Define severity by business impact

Severity should be written in dealership terms: cannot close a deal, cannot open a repair order, cannot post to accounting, cannot dispatch. A vendor-defined severity scale usually rates its own outage lower than you would.

Response is not resolution

A four-hour response commitment with no resolution target means someone acknowledges the ticket and nothing more. Ask what the provider commits to for resolution or workaround, and what happens when that is missed.

Availability needs a measurement method

Ask what counts as downtime, whether planned maintenance is excluded, what the measurement window is, and who reports the number. An availability figure the vendor calculates and never publishes is not a commitment.

Make the remedy proportionate

Service credits that refund a fraction of a monthly fee do not cover a lost Saturday. Where the system is operationally critical, negotiate escalation rights and termination rights for repeated failure rather than relying on credits.

A workable severity table

Write three or four levels in the dealership's own terms. The highest is when a core process stops for the whole store, such as selling or repair orders.

The next is a major function degraded for many users. The third is a limited or single-user issue.

For each, agree a response time, an update interval and a target for restoring service or providing a workaround. Keep the table in the contract, not the sales deck.

Reports and reviews

Ask the provider to deliver a periodic report showing availability, incidents by severity and the time to respond and resolve. Hold a short review each quarter, and keep a record of every outage with its date, duration and effect on the store. This record supports a discussion of remedies and is useful evidence at renewal when the provider's own figures differ from experience.

Common mistakes with service levels

Agreeing an availability percentage without a definition of downtime is the most common. Relying on credits that are requested by the customer within a short window, which many customers miss, is another.

A third is leaving out planned maintenance windows and their timing. Finally, check that the SLA applies to the integrations and hosted components you depend on, not only to the main application.

What to file and review

Keep the signed service terms with a one-page summary of severity levels and response targets, so that staff know what to expect. After any serious incident, compare what happened with the commitments and write a short note. The notes become evidence at renewal and help decide whether the provider is meeting its obligations.