Data is integral to running a successful car dealership. It’s essential for measuring things like sales performance, service revenue, inventory turnover, customer satisfaction, and much more. However, many dealers aren’t using their data to its full potential.
Clunky, manual reporting processes make it challenging to create complete, up-to-date insights. And while the numbers behind your operations don’t lie, they can absolutely hide — especially when they're buried in disconnected systems across multiple rooftops.
Even if you use a basic reporting tool, you may be limited to a short list of report templates and analytics features without the flexibility to build reports that effectively meet your business needs.
If you’ve ever found yourself digging through spreadsheets, pulling together data from different Dealer Management Systems (DMSs), or manually reconciling discrepancies between departments, you’re not alone. The problem isn’t that you don’t have enough data at your disposal. It’s that your data is scattered, siloed, and outdated by the time it gets into the hands of decision-makers.
Let’s explore several of the challenges associated with reporting across multiple rooftops and how you can start bringing your data together in timely, comprehensive reports and dashboards.
Common Reporting Challenges for Car Dealers
Siloed Data Across Multiple Systems
Dealer groups with multiple brands or rooftops commonly use more than one DMS, each with its own data structures, terminologies, and limitations. One location might run CDK Global, while another nearby uses Dealertrack. Pulling consistent and reliable performance data from multiple DMSs simultaneously can be challenging.
What’s more, even single-rooftop dealerships often use several third-party tools for CRM, service scheduling, marketing automation, and inventory management. The result is a fragmented data landscape where no single system tells the full story.
Without a unified data platform and adept reporting capabilities, each department — and each rooftop — functions in its own bubble, and executives can’t get an accurate view of performance across the entire organization.
Inconsistent Data Structures
A seemingly simple metric like “gross profit per vehicle” may be calculated differently from one system to another. Different field names, data types, and categorization make it challenging to combine metrics without extensive manual work or custom system integrations.
This inconsistency makes it nearly impossible to monitor key metrics between locations, and it can create massive internal headaches for the employees responsible for reporting. They might attempt to combine insights manually in Excel or simply end up leaving out certain figures for the sake of time and report consistency. Either way, report recipients end up with inaccurate, incomplete results.
Lack of Timely Business Insights
In many dealerships, someone is still manually exporting reports, building spreadsheets, and updating dashboards on a pre-set schedule. Aside from being slow and error-prone, this process consumes valuable time that should be spent analyzing performance and taking action.
Rather than conducting complex, time-consuming ‘data autopsies’ at the end of each week, month, or quarter, employees need the ability to run quick ‘daily health checks’ on the data most relevant to their role. Waiting until month-end to identify a sales slump or a service revenue dip is too late. By then, the opportunity to course correct has already passed.
How a Comprehensive Reporting and BI Solution Can Help
Disjointed data is a common challenge in the automotive industry, but the good news is, a specialized business intelligence (BI) and reporting solution built just for dealers can help.
TARGIT offers a specialized BI and reporting solution that connects directly to dealers’ DMSs and the other systems they use to manage operations. Our platform seamlessly combines efficiency and flexibility, allowing you to hit the ground running with templated reports and dashboards or build your own for customized data analysis.
By aggregating information from multiple DMSs and third-party sources, TARGIT creates a comprehensive view of your operational data – and offers user-friendly tools that turn that data into actionable, strategic insights.
Here’s how:
Seamless Data Integration
TARGIT’s BI platform easily pulls data from multiple DMSs, CRMs, and third-party systems into a single analytics environment. With built-in connectors and robust data processing capabilities, it harmonizes data so you can stop worrying about format inconsistencies and start focusing on insights.
No matter how many rooftops or platforms you’re working with, TARGIT provides a unified data platform that’s equal parts flexible and powerful. We’ve already built pre-configured integrations to all major industry DMSs, and our expert team can develop custom solutions for any data source not already in our library.
Our data integration and processing capabilities transform multi-source data into a comprehensive, uniform data library. The result? Dashboards and reports that reflect the complete picture of your business, with everything from transaction-level insights to a holistic overview of your entire enterprise.
Automated Reporting
Once your data is connected, you can start using TARGIT to share automated reports that update regularly based on the custom schedule you set.
Instead of combining spreadsheets by hand, you get instant access to 250+ best practice report templates for every department. It’s easy to configure these reports for various locations, departments, and roles. Plus, empower users to design additional custom reports based on their unique data needs.
Once your reports are ready to share, you can use TARGIT’s batch reporting to schedule and distribute them to your employees’ inboxes automatically. From traditional PDF reports for email delivery to mobile-ready reports for frontline employees, TARGIT ensures everyone stays informed and aligned without requiring hours of manual work from your team.
This approach eliminates the time suck of manual reporting, reduces human error, and ensures your team is always working from the latest numbers.
Customizable KPI Dashboards
TARGIT makes it easy to tailor dashboards to meet the needs of everyone at your dealership. Create overviews for your Dealer Principal, General Manager, Fixed Ops Director, or CFO, each with the insights they need to monitor progress and make informed decisions. Track key performance indicators (KPIs) like:
- Gross Sales Margin
- Gross Profit Across Departments/Brands/Locations
- Inventory Turnover
- Year-to-Date Profit & Loss
- Clocking Efficiency
- Customer & Vendor Aging
Users can get a quick overview of the numbers in just a click, then drill down into specific rooftops, departments, or customer segments. Choose from a range of KPI Objects and design elements to create dashboards that clearly communicate your key metrics and make it easy for end-users to understand and interact with them.
Cross-Rooftop Reporting
The numbers within each rooftop aren’t the only metrics you need to measure. Monitor high-level company performance and compare apples to apples across your entire business.
With TARGIT, you can benchmark stores against each other, monitor trends by geography or vehicle make, and quickly identify which locations are over- or under-performing. For example, create a report for all Ford locations and compare each individual rooftop against the group. Or, run a report to see how a single Ford location compares to an Acura one.
Want to know how your Texas-based dealerships are doing compared to your Midwest stores? Or how last week’s ad campaign affected trade-in volume across all rooftops? Now you can find out in seconds.
Best Practices for Comprehensive Dealership Reporting
- Standardize Your KPIs: Before you integrate data, define best practice KPIs that work across brands and systems.
- Prioritize Data Quality: Garbage in, garbage out. Ensure your data management practices include cleansing and validation.
- Visualize Intelligently: Use dashboards to highlight trends and exceptions within your data and choose dashboard elements that effectively tell the story behind your numbers.
- Empower Your Users: Prioritize a BI solution that makes it easy for non-technical business users to build and modify reports without relying on developers.
- Think Enterprise-Wide: Even if you start with one department or rooftop, design your data strategy to scale and evolve with your business.
Ready to Unify Your Dealership’s Data?
An all-in-one BI solution can transform your dealership’s approach to data analysis and help you turn operational data into a strategic growth tool.
By turning data siloes into a unified data platform, equipped with a user-friendly interface and powerful reporting capabilities, you’ll empower your entire team to start making data-driven decisions.
To find the right reporting solution for your car dealership, you need to know which features are most valuable and how to effectively compare your options.
In our how-to guide, you'll learn how data can help you take control of your dealership's daily numbers and exactly what to look for in a BI and reporting solution.
How-To Guide: Seven Things to Look for in a Reporting Solution for Your Car Dealership
TARGIT has helped over 400 automotive dealer groups transform their approach to working with data. If you're ready to unify your reporting, get instant insight into your operations, and make smarter, faster decisions, it’s time to see what TARGIT can do for your business.
