A Champlin Enterprises Product
Auto Recon Manager gives every vehicle a live workflow from the day it arrives — inspections, vendor work, parallel department steps, dual sign-off, and a real-time picture of exactly where every unit stands and why it's not on the lot yet. It's the operational layer between acquisition and the front line — the part your DMS and your OEM inspection systems were never built to run.
Every vehicle has a live status — current step, who owns it, how many days it's been there.
Replace the whiteboard and the Google Sheet with one system everyone works from — updated in real time.
Every step has a name attached. No more "I thought you were doing it."
The dashboard surfaces which step has the most vehicles piling up — before the GM has to ask.
A live command center for everything in recon — what's where, who has it, and what's about to blow your turn time.
Every step tracked, assigned, and timestamped. No guessing, no dropped balls, no units sitting three weeks in a department nobody checked on.
Build your recon pipeline once — parts, service, body, detail, photography — then apply it to any vehicle in two clicks. Steps move in order, with owners and timestamps at every gate.
Service and parts don't have to wait on each other. Run multiple departments simultaneously — each step has its own owner and completion state — so cars move through faster.
Service Complete and Detail Complete are two independent buttons. Both must be pressed — with a timestamp and the employee's name — before the vehicle automatically moves to Front Line Ready. No shortcuts.
A complete, built-in inspection form — engine, exterior, interior, tires, under-vehicle — with draft save and one-tap sign-off. You don't need CarBravo or any third-party tool to run a thorough inspection; it's all here. Already use one? Cross-reference a GM CarBravo (or other OEM) inspection number so the outside record and your recon record stay tied to the same VIN. Standalone by default, interoperable when you want it.
Each person sees only their own queue. Unassigned jobs go into a shop pool — any eligible technician can claim one first-come, first-served. Managers see everyone's queue with a single dropdown.
Total vehicles by status, average days in recon, completion rate, and a Bottlenecks panel that shows which step has the most cars piling up — updated live every time anyone takes an action.
External services — glass, body shop, upholstery — are tied directly to the workflow step that needs them. If a vendor is causing delays, the dashboard surfaces it.
Record the full deal — front/back gross, add-ons, salesperson. Import from AutoMate or Reynolds with Excel. Reports by month, salesperson, vehicle model, and add-on type. The recon record stays tied to the sale.
Flag any vehicle High or Urgent — the badge surfaces on inventory, vehicle detail, and every task queue. Fully responsive; add to the home screen on iOS or Android for a full-screen app experience.
Four stages, one system. Every transition is logged, owned, and visible to the people who need to see it.
Most cars arrive on their own — the daily inventory feed brings the lot in automatically every morning. For the rest: log by stock # and VIN, set priority (Normal / High / Urgent), and start a workflow from a reusable template. One-step vAuto CSV import covers the car that can't wait.
A technician opens the 172-point inspection form — draft saves automatically, one tap completes and signs it off. Or, if the OEM 126-point form was completed in GM Global, cross-reference its GM CarBravo inspection number so the recon record and the OEM record point at the same VIN.
Parts, service, body, detail, and vendors each work their step — concurrently or in order. The shop pool lets techs claim unassigned work. Every advance is timestamped. Delay alerts fire if a step sits too long.
When Service signs off and Detail signs off — independently, on their own buttons — the vehicle automatically flips to Front Line Ready. It's then available to start the sale flow and record the deal.
Point your vAuto report scheduler at Auto Recon Manager once, and every morning's inventory export imports itself — parsed, de-duplicated by VIN, and in front of your techs before the service lane opens. No downloads, no re-uploads, no re-keying, and nobody babysitting a spreadsheet. The manager finds out what came in the same way you'd want to: a short receipt in their inbox.
3 new vehicles came in from the inventory feed and are ready for the techs.
| Stock | Vehicle | VIN |
|---|---|---|
| DM-1046 | '24 Chevrolet Traverse LT | 1GN••••••••••4821 |
| DM-1047 | '23 GMC Sierra 1500 SLT | 1GT••••••••••0339 |
| DM-1048 | '22 Ford Escape SE | 1FM••••••••••7754 |
Your inventory tool already knows how to email a scheduled export — vAuto's report scheduler takes about two minutes to point at us. From then on the lot syncs itself every morning, weekends included.
The feed only ever adds vehicles — it never archives, never overwrites, never touches a car your team is working on. A unit already in the system is recognized by VIN and left exactly as it is, so re-running the same export is a no-op.
After every run that brings cars in, the manager gets a summary email listing exactly which vehicles arrived — stock number, vehicle, VIN. You always know what the feed did without logging in to check.
If a morning report ever fails to arrive — schedule turned off, format changed, anything — the system raises an alert the same day. Silent failure isn't a mode. And the one-step manual import stays for the car that needs to be in front of the techs right now.
Your DMS owns the deal. Your OEM systems — GM Global, a GM CarBravo inspection on the cars that have one — own the official inspection record. Neither one runs the floor between acquisition and front-line ready: who has the car right now, which step it's stuck on, and why it isn't on the lot yet. That's the layer Auto Recon Manager owns, and it's built to sit cleanly inside the stack you already run rather than replace it. Interoperable today on the data your store already produces, and architected to integrate deeper as the platforms around it open up.
Don't use CarBravo? You don't need it — the built-in 172-point inspection stands on its own. But if you do, tie its inspection number to the VIN so the outside record and your recon record stay matched on the same car — no double entry.
Sits alongside AutoMate, Reynolds, and vAuto instead of competing with them — inventory streams in automatically from your vAuto scheduled export every morning, deals come in by Excel, and the deal stays where it already lives.
Inspection status, every workflow step, dual service and detail sign-off, vendor work, and a full timestamped audit trail — the floor-level reality the systems above it never capture.
A clean, role-scoped data model and a complete audit trail — the operational layer the OEM and used-car stack doesn't provide, designed to interoperate rather than wall itself off.
Access is role-gated — techs see their queue, sales sees what's front-line ready, admins see everything. Nobody trips over each other.
Add vehicles, manage users, edit workflow templates, configure settings, run all reports. Sees every queue in the shop.
Same access as Admin for daily operations — add vehicles, reassign tasks, view anyone's queue, approve inspections, run reports.
Full visibility into workflow steps and recon reports without access to Add Vehicle or Sales tabs — scoped to their lane.
Sees their assigned steps and available shop-pool work. Claim a vehicle, complete a step, advance to the next — that's the whole interface.
Detail steps and Photography (gated to Detailer role). Presses the Detail Complete button when done — independently from Service.
Parts steps in the workflow. Works their queue the same way as Tech — claim, complete, advance — without seeing other departments' lanes.
Sees what's Front Line Ready and can add new vehicles. Records sales and views sales reports. No access to workflow internals.
Role structure matches how a real used-car operation runs. Deployed and configured for your dealership's specific workflow.
A unit stuck in recon isn't standing still — it's bleeding. Floor-plan interest, depreciation, and the line slot it isn't filling. Dealers commonly peg the cost of holding a used vehicle at $30–$40 a day. That meter runs on every car parked in a step nobody's watching — and most stores can't even say which cars those are.
The rule-of-thumb carrying cost of a used vehicle — interest, depreciation, and lot cost — that keeps running for every day a car sits in recon instead of on the line.
The real-time dashboard flags the exact step a car is stuck on the moment it stalls — not three days later at the Monday meeting, after the cost is already sunk.
Your monthly used volume × the days you'd stop losing × your holding cost. Whatever that number is, it dwarfs the software — and right now you're paying it without seeing it.
Cutting just 3 days off your average would put about $75,600 a year back on your floor plan. We'll be in touch about seeing it on your own inventory.
Auto Recon Manager wasn't drawn up in a conference room. It was built inside a working single-rooftop dealership and runs that store's entire reconditioning operation today — every unit, every department, from the wash bay to the front line. This is the floor's daily operating tool, not a slide deck.
Not a beta, not a mockup. A real dealership runs its reconditioning on this every business day — the work depends on it.
Technicians, detailers, parts, service, sales, and management all work from the same system — not a report someone backfills later, the tool the floor actually runs on.
Every feature exists because a real shop needed it. No theoretical workflows — just the ones a store runs day in and day out.
Straight answers about what Auto Recon Manager is, how it gets your inventory, and what it costs to find out if it works on your floor.
Vehicle reconditioning workflow software for used-car dealerships. It tracks every unit from intake through inspection, vendor services, parallel recon steps, and dual service/detail sign-off until it's front-line ready — with a real-time bottleneck dashboard over the whole floor.
It imports itself. A scheduled vAuto export feeds the app every morning — add-only and VIN de-duplicated — and a summary email lists every vehicle the feed brought in. Nobody keys in stock numbers by hand.
No. It sits alongside them and runs the part they don't: the physical reconditioning workflow between acquisition and the front line. Your appraisal, pricing, and accounting tools stay exactly where they are.
The whole floor, each with role-scoped access: technicians, detailers, parts, service, sales, managers, and admins all work from the same live board instead of a report someone backfills later.
We configure it to your store's exact recon steps and walk your own live stock through it — you evaluate your actual floor, not a canned demo. It's a custom Champlin Enterprises deployment, not a self-serve trial.
Deployment is priced per store — contact Champlin Enterprises for a quote. It carries a 90-day guarantee: if your average time-in-recon hasn't dropped, the deployment is refunded in full, measured by the app itself.
See it on your own inventory — not a canned demo. We'll configure Auto Recon Manager to your store's exact recon steps and walk your real stock through it, so you're evaluating your own floor instead of a slideshow. Built and maintained by Champlin Enterprises, LLC; deployed for the way your shop actually works.
