Large, multi-location auto dealerships operate complex business hierarchies, with headquarters overseeing multiple automotive brands, locations, departments, and staffing roles. This operating model presents unique challenges with accepting, managing, and analyzing payment activity. Typically, each location has dedicated merchant services and bank accounts.
Central office executives and finance teams must track, report, and compare organizational performance metrics at every level of the hierarchy to understand the business's health and make informed decisions. Location managers and teams manage daily operations across sales, service, parts, and financing departments.
Digital Transformation Drives Change
Not long ago, most dealerships conducted most of their business in person, typically accepting all payments either at a central checkout or at counters in separate departments. Today, that business model has gone the way of the Model T.
Consumers demand the convenience of digital payments with every interaction made in person, online, or via text or email. This omnichannel approach to payments requires cloud-connected systems that make it easy to access information from anywhere and parse data to obtain a view of customers and transaction activity for any level in the dealership’s hierarchy.
Some dealerships may handle exception processing—refunds, adjustments, outstanding balances and chargebacks—at a central location to optimize staffing schedules and reduce costs. Removing these time-consuming tasks from local dealership teams allows them to focus on customer-facing activities.
Front-office Benefits of Cloud-connected Payment Solutions
Dealerships are increasingly moving away from inefficient stand-alone payment devices that require a lot of manual processes, from double-keying to paper receipts, multiple batches and disparate reporting. Modern, cloud-connected solutions streamline payment acceptance, allowing frontline staff to spend more time on client-facing activities.
Virtual Terminals Boost Productivity
A Virtual Terminal streamlines payment acceptance by turning any browser-connected device – desktop, laptop, tablet or smartphone – into a cloud-based credit card terminal. Unlike a stand-alone credit card terminal and paper receipts, a Virtual Terminal allows you to accept payments from customers in person, over the phone, online and via electronic invoices. Transaction details are paired with customer information and stored digitally, providing quick access to payment history. Plus, you can access records and conduct business from anywhere: in the office, at home and on the road.
Integrated Payments Accelerate Efficiencies
Software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions have transformed operations for multi-location businesses. Dealership Management Systems (DMS) foster connectivity and permit the flow of information throughout an enterprise, including inventory, sales, service, parts, customers and billing. DMS solutions eliminate a siloed business structure, help dealerships drive profitable growth, streamline business operations and deliver a superior customer experience.
Integrated payment processing further streamlines operations by initiating payments in the DMS so transaction information can automatically flow to billing and customer management systems. Solutions like PayJunction’s No-code Payments IntegrationⓇ allow dealers to integrate payments in minutes using a free browser extension to define transaction fields, securely capture payment details, and map workflows. Staff can use it for in-person transactions, phone payments, email and text invoice requests, and more.
Back-office Benefits of Consolidated Payments for Multi-location Dealerships
In addition to the benefits that a Virtual Terminal or Integrated Payment solution delivers on the front end when accepting payments, multi-location auto dealers gain efficiencies in managing all activity.
Track Department Sales
Instead of manually filing, tallying and storing paper receipts, use a Virtual Terminal of Integrated Payments to automate this process. Whether all sales go through a central cashier or in each department, all transactions, receipts and batches are logged to the respective department and stored digitally in one central location for easy future reference.
Headquarters staff can view individual department or location sales or aggregate the data for viewing at a regional or brand level.
Streamline Deposit Reconciliation
A sophisticated and connected payment solution can simplify accounting tasks whether finance teams are centralized or located within each dealership. The systems automatically total multiple batches, allowing you to eliminate manual processes before reconciling your bank deposits.
Often, funds deposited to bank accounts differ from the batch total reported. Detailed deposit reports remove the guesswork and allow you to address differences immediately, not when merchant statements are available at the end of the month.
Deposit reports allow you to verify funds daily by providing the deposit total along with the fees charged, any chargebacks that occurred and other fees. All you need to do is compare the totaled batch report to your deposit report, and that’s it! You’ve reconciled your bank account.
Control User Access
It’s challenging to track staff accountability across multiple locations and departments. With old-school terminals, there is simply no way to audit who is doing what, which can be problematic when troubleshooting an accounting issue. Secure, cloud-connected Virtual Terminals and Integrated Payments allow you to grant permissions to administrators while restricting users from issuing refunds or looking through transactions or reports.
Systems need to log all user activity and associated actions taken so you can quickly glance at any team's performance over any period. Finally, you can restrict user access to a department or location to avoid transaction errors and reduce fraud.
Generate Beautiful Reports
Manually tracking sales performance wastes time and is prone to human error. Using an old-school terminal requires staff to manually tally batch reports for approximately 30 days of sales just to produce one month’s total, and that's for just one terminal. If you need a quarterly report, you must total results for each terminal and then per department for three consecutive months.
Use Integrated Payments or a Virtual Terminal to run reports automatically and gain insights into a department or location’s performance across custom periods. You can also compare the relative performance of brands, locations and departments, as well as past versus current quarters or years.
Say goodbye to the guessing game of managing payments across multiple locations and departments at your dealership. Get on the road to productivity today!
See the Virtual Terminal in action.
Editor's Note: This post was originally published in May 2018 and has been updated for comprehensiveness and accuracy.
