While inventory and sales management tools are mainstays for the retail auto industry, a lot of independent auto dealers are now adding floor plan financing platforms to optimize their operations.
Given the importance of financing for the success of the business, having a central, easy-to-navigate platform is crucial for growing dealerships. By offering transparency and control over the entire lifecycle of a floor plan loan, this technology gives dealers a smarter way to manage their financing and inventory.
The operational intensity of auto businesses limits owners’ and operators’ focus and time to core business needs. By choosing a financing partner that has a technology platform, dealers can remain focused on business needs by streamlining the floor planning and cash management processes (exchanging bills of sale, titles, payments, funding, etc.).
Which is the ultimate qualifier for dealer technology: the best tools help dealers do what they do best; sell cars.
Treasury Management can help mitigate financial, operational, and reputational risk by providing tools to better understand the financial state of a business. Clients can utilize reporting solutions to improve forecasting, decision making, and cash management
How does floor planning technology help dealership operations?
In short, dealer financing platforms, like Lever Auto’s combine Treasury Management and inventory management into one system. These platforms can help mitigate financial, operational, and reputational risk by providing tools to better understand the financial state of a business.
Cash flow management
Floor plan programs give dealers an opportunity to preserve cash. Some financing companies, like Lever Auto, offer even more insights through their dealer portal that gives users an overview of payment schedules and monthly cash commitments. When a dealer has all their cash activities tracked and scheduled in one central dashboard, they can make smarter decisions about their inventory and sales strategy.
Cost management
Besides showing cash activity across the entire inventory, these dashboards also break down costs into per-unit views. When flooring a car through the platform, a dealer can see the interest, principle, and any ancillary fees associated with each vehicle. Lever Auto calls this our “all-in” calculator and overview. By having per-unit numbers aggregated on the platform, dealers can quickly pull reports and see their total financing and flooring costs.
Lastly, since the platform captures financing activity, dealers can build their reputation and creditworthiness. This gives dealers the chance to leverage their behavior and performance on the platform to extend their lines and lower their interest rates.
Inventory management
By having an aggregation of inventory metrics, dealers can understand their specific business trends. What cars are selling? What cars bring the highest margin? What types of cars are the most cost-efficient? Where should we focus our credit and at what wholesale channels?
Most dealers have access to inventory management systems and by coupling these systems with their financing metrics, they have full transparency into their unit economics and inventory trends.
Time management
It’s simple. Dashboards are less time-consuming than manual tracking and filing of financing information. Dealer dashboards are designed to be easy to navigate and have all important front and center. By centralizing the inventory and financing data, dealers can floor cars, apply for extensions, pull reports, and analyze their inventory in a few clicks. Floor planning platforms can save dealers and their staff hours of time each week.
This allows dealers to Focus on what they do best. Selling cars.
