Automotive Avenues is the largest independent used car dealership in New Jersey. They move serious volume and they've been doing it for years. But like every high-volume operation, their reporting infrastructure hadn't kept pace with their growth.
This is their story. I'm sharing it because the specifics are theirs, but the pattern is one I've seen at stores of every size and type.
The Morning Before Voltra
Their general manager's morning started with a checklist that wasn't written down anywhere. It was just muscle memory. Check deal status in the DMS. Check funding in DealerTrack F&I. Check the CRM for lead follow-up. Check vAuto for pricing and aging. Check Rapid Recon for what's stuck in the shop. Check the CIT sheet for cars in transit. Open the buying center spreadsheet. Pull up StoneEagle for F&I product tracking. Check VistaDash for analytics. Open Xtime for the service schedule. Log into the floorplan portal for curtailment dates.
That's eleven systems before 8 AM. And the general manager wasn't the only person who needed this information. Sales managers needed pieces of it. The F&I director needed different pieces. The service director needed the Xtime and DMS data. Everyone was pulling from the same fragmented stack, but nobody was seeing the same complete picture.
Where It Cost Them
The obvious cost was the GM's time: roughly 45 minutes every morning spent on data gathering instead of management. But the more expensive cost was what fell through the cracks.
One quarter, their aged inventory climbed higher than they'd typically allow. The data was available in vAuto, but by the time the full picture was assembled alongside everything else, the number had grown past the point where a few repricing decisions could fix it. They had to work through the backlog over weeks instead of catching it early and addressing it in days.
Their morning meetings had a recurring friction point too. Different managers would reference slightly different numbers: one pulled from the CRM, another from the DMS, another calculated by hand from a report. The first chunk of every meeting was spent reconciling instead of strategizing. That time cost compounded across every meeting, every week.
The service department had its own version of this problem. The service director tracked RO counts and advisor performance in the DMS, but those numbers never made it into the GM's morning view. Service essentially ran as a separate business inside the building. When things were going well, nobody at the top noticed because the data wasn't visible alongside sales and F&I. When things weren't going well — an advisor's production dipping, or the customer-pay mix shifting — the problem went undetected until the monthly financial statement surfaced it weeks later.
And then there was the reconciliation problem at month-end. Because data was being pulled from different systems at different times by different people, the numbers the management team had been using all month didn't always match the actual financials. Discrepancies between what was in the CRM, what was in the DMS, and what the controller was seeing in the accounting system created hours of reconciliation work and occasionally unpleasant surprises.
What Changed
Automotive Avenues was one of Voltra's earliest implementations. We connected their vendor portals — DMS, DealerTrack F&I, VinSolutions, vAuto, Rapid Recon, StoneEagle, Xtime, and the rest — into a single dashboard.
On the first morning, their standup meeting ran 15 minutes. Every person in the room was looking at the same data. There was nothing to reconcile, nothing to debate. The conversation went straight to action items.
Three things changed noticeably over the following months.
First, the time savings were immediate and consistent. The morning meeting went from 40+ minutes of data gathering and debate to a focused 15-minute operations review. The GM recaptured roughly 30 minutes every morning. That time went directly to floor coaching, deal review, and customer interaction. Across the management team, the cumulative hours recaptured added up to the equivalent of hiring a part-time employee, except nobody was hired. The same people just had more time to do their actual jobs.
Second, they started catching problems earlier. Within the first month, the consolidated view surfaced an inventory aging trend that would have taken another two weeks to notice under the old system. They were able to reprice and move units before the floorplan cost compounded. Over the course of a quarter, earlier intervention on aging inventory alone justified the time spent implementing the platform.
Third, the data arguments stopped. One dashboard, one set of numbers, one source of truth. Meetings became shorter and more productive because nobody was defending their version of what happened. The conversation moved to what to do next. Month-end reconciliation became significantly smoother too. When everyone operates from the same data source all month, there are fewer surprises when the financials close.
There was a subtler shift too. When the data became visible and consistent, accountability changed. Before consolidation, it was easy for any department to operate in its own silo and only surface numbers when they looked good. With all metrics visible to the entire management team every morning, there was nowhere to hide, and nobody needed to hide. The transparency removed the politics from the numbers and let people focus on the work.
The service department saw a particularly notable change. Once service KPIs appeared on the same screen as sales and F&I, the GM started asking questions about fixed ops that had never come up in morning meetings before. That attention — not a new process, not a new hire, just attention — drove improvements in advisor performance over the following months simply because the numbers were being watched.
Why This Matters Beyond One Store
When other dealers heard about the change, the question was always the same: "We have that exact problem. Can we do the same thing?"
The answer is yes, because the underlying problem isn't unique to any single dealership. It shows up at franchise groups running 30 rooftops and single-point operations doing 60 units a month. The vendor names might be different, the volume is different, but the fragmentation is identical.
The pattern I see at every store is the same: smart, experienced operators spending their mornings on data logistics instead of management. The information they need exists; it just lives in too many places. The fix isn't about working harder or hiring another person to build reports. It's about connecting the systems you already have and letting the data flow to the people who need it.
If your morning involves a stack of browser tabs, 30+ minutes of data assembly, and meetings that start by debating which number is correct, the fix isn't complicated. It just requires putting all of that data in one place and letting your team spend their time on decisions instead of data entry.