Raise Your Document Storage Standards!
In a single year, dealerships manage thousands of documents, not to mention the numerous historical documents they must maintain. An annual survey from NADA states that over 40 different types of documentation may be required for just one automobile transaction. That adds up, too. In 2022, dealers will collectively sell close to 14 million light-duty vehicles. (To put it mildly, that’s a ton of documents.)
Business operations require document management, but storing and retrieving these documents has never been easy. It’s a time-consuming manual process that produces missing or duplicate documents, recurrent work, and security problems.
Dealers need to increase their document management standards to ensure security and maintain compliance as consumers choose increasingly digital purchasing experiences and compliance regulations continue to have an influence on the business.
INFORMATION CENTRALIZATION
When documents are kept in several locations, managing them becomes more challenging. Dealerships must work with a variety of storage vendors when it comes time to collect important assets because they are managed by numerous people and/or entities. Even digital records are frequently kept in each dealership’s software solution, raising questions about compliance and uniformity.
The optimal practice for document storage is to have each document housed in a single, central location. This makes organizing easier, guarantees uniformity, and enhances document retrieval and search. A unified storage system integrates throughout the whole dealership, allowing dealers to maintain consistency and index all documents as components of the same deal workflow.
AUTOMATION OF DOCUMENTS
Managing documents manually takes time and effort. Physical papers may slip through the gaps, both literally and figuratively, and storing them may be quite expensive. NADA estimates that dealerships spend $20 on labor only to file a document, and an additional $100 to $200 if the paperwork needs to be duplicated or filed incorrectly. Dealers should look to establish automated document capture rather than depend on numerous, unconnected processes to keep records.
A document created by a dealership is automatically recorded and saved as part of the workflow process for a deal. Every form of a document, whether it be a transaction document, a financial report, or even a picture from the service lane, is always indexed to the same customer profile for simple retrieval thanks to automated document management.
SECURITY OF DOCUMENTS
Information about consumers must be secure at all times. Recent federal rules have emphasized the importance of protecting consumer information, requiring dealers to establish additional security strategies and practices in order to comply. Dealerships must step up their document security procedures as transactions become more digital and fraud cases rise.
Automating document management into a single dealership storage repository assures compliance in addition to these more useful advantages. Dealers can track document retention on a customer-by-customer and case-by-case basis while managing papers in a safe location. Additionally, until the end of each particular retention policy, dealers can safely and securely access and read records.
The automotive sector is starting to pay a lot of attention to document management. It’s time for dealers to strengthen their document management standards, both collectively and individually, as dealerships enter the new digital era and document security becomes even more crucial. The efficiency and accessibility of document storage are increased by automating and centralizing it, while security and compliance are also ensured.
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