Automotive · overview of the dealership operation

The Automotive vertical turns SellioCRM into the operating dashboard of a dealership or used car lot: stores with their own profile, vehicle inventory with VIN, a reservation that keeps the same car from being sold twice, test drives, a radar for leads past their first-contact window, and the desking screen that works out the monthly payment. It is optional and ships turned off: an administrator has to enable it under Settings, Verticals.

What the Automotive vertical does

The Automotive vertical gives SellioCRM the vocabulary and the guardrails of a business that sells vehicles: the physical unit with its VIN, the store it sits in, the reservation that holds the car for a customer, the scheduled test drive, the customer's interest recorded against the catalog, and the desking math that answers the question the customer actually asks at the counter, which is what the monthly payment will be.

It exists because a generic CRM cannot carry this business. An ordinary deal has no VIN, does not disappear from inventory when it is sold, and has no need to know that the car is at another store in the group. The vertical solves those four things without making you give up anything you already use: contacts, companies, opportunities, activities, reports and the assistant keep working exactly as before.

What it is not: a dealer management system. The vertical does not issue invoices, does not open a shop repair order, does not write a finance contract and does not replace your back office system. Cost and inventory numbers can be mirrored from your management system, and each vehicle stores where the data came from and when it was read. What the vertical handles is the commercial side: who wants to buy, which car, for how much and over how many payments.

How to enable it

1. Open Settings and choose Verticals.
2. Find Automotive and enable it. Only workspace administrators can do that.
3. Open Automotive in the side menu. While the vertical is off, the screen says it is not enabled and offers the shortcut to enable it under Verticals.
4. Register your stores on the Stores & access tab and give people access before you list your first vehicle.

The six tabs on the Automotive screen

• Overview: the operating numbers for the stores you have access to, meaning total vehicles, active reservations, active leads and leads past SLA, plus the inventory broken down by status.
• Stores & access: sets the automotive profile of each organizational unit and who belongs to each store.
• Inventory: registering and listing the vehicles available, with the Reserve, Sell and Release buttons.
• Test drives: scheduling and outcome of each test drive, with the Completed, No-show and Cancel buttons.
• Opportunities: the leads that blew past the first-contact window and the customers who are candidates to trade in.
• Desking: the negotiation desk, with the payment calculated from the price and the reverse calculation, the price from the payment.

The vehicle shows up in four roles

The same car means different things depending on the role it plays in the conversation. The vertical models all four roles over a shared catalog, so that Make, Model, Trim and Year mean the same thing in every one of them.

• The catalog model: the specification, meaning Make, Model, Trim, Year, body style, fuel and transmission. It is what exists in the world, not a unit.
• The unit in inventory: the physical car on the lot, with VIN, plate, color, mileage, price and status. It is the only one that can be reserved and sold.
• The vehicle the customer already owns: used in the trade-in appraisal and in the repurchase radar. It stores the VIN, plate, mileage, purchase date and the payoff balance as reported.
• The vehicle of interest: what the customer is looking for. It can point at a catalog model, at a specific unit on the lot, or at a set of criteria such as a price range and a minimum year.

Stores and who sees what

Stores are not a new record type: they are your organizational units, with an automotive profile layered on top. On each store you declare the type, among Dealership, Used only, Multibrand, Service, BDC and Other, and the make or manufacturer where that makes sense.

The default is isolation by store. A person sees only the inventory, test drives and leads of the stores they belong to, and can only list vehicles at those stores. Seeing another store's inventory is an exception that has to be declared, not the normal behavior. That is why the Overview warns that the numbers cover only the stores you have access to: two salespeople from different stores see different numbers on the same screen, and that is correct.

Permissions and limits

• Enabling the vertical and configuring store profiles requires an administrator role.
• A vehicle's acquisition cost and reconditioning cost are restricted: they do not appear on the inventory screen, not even to the person selling.
• The VIN, when entered, is validated by its check digit. An invalid VIN is refused.
• Each VIN is unique within your workspace: the same car is never registered twice.
• While the vertical is off, every query from the screen is refused and nothing is displayed.

Frequently asked questions

• Why does the screen say the vertical is not enabled? Because nobody has enabled it yet. An administrator enables it under Settings, Verticals, and the screen works immediately.
• Why do I not see any vehicles? Either no vehicle has been listed, or you do not belong to any store. Ask for access on the Stores & access tab.
• Does disabling the vertical erase my data? No. Disabling only hides the screen and refuses the queries; vehicles, reservations and test drives stay stored and reappear when you enable it again.
• Does a car disappear from inventory when it is sold? It does not disappear, its status changes to Sold, which is a final state. The history stays available.
• Do I still need my back office system? You do. The vertical handles the sale, not the invoicing and not the service shop.

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