© Copyright LEVER 2022. All Rights Reserved
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.).
Most dealer financing plans include fees and penalties policies to keep dealers in compliance. This creates a lot of friction between lenders and dealers. While risk management is required for lenders, how they approach penalties can vary. Most dealer financing companies are quick to penalize dealers for every infraction or risk-triggering action. Lever Auto believes in proactive strategies and corrective action plans for dealers that are out of compliance. Our customer success team will have open conversations with their dealers once they need helps or support.
Which is the ultimate qualifier for dealer technology: the best tools help dealers do what they do best; sell assets.
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
In short, dealer financing platforms, like Lever Auto, 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.
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.
Besides showing cash activity across the entire inventory, these dashboards also break down costs into per-unit views. When flooring an asset through the platform, a dealer can see the interest, principle, and any ancillary fees associated with each asset. 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.
By having an aggregation of inventory metrics, dealers can understand their specific business trends. What assets are selling? What assets bring the highest margin? What types of assets 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.
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 assets, 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 assets.
© Copyright LEVER 2022. All Rights Reserved