Ballyrobert - A customer feature

Ballyrobert was established as a Vauxhall dealer in Bangor in 1960 and has served the Greater Belfast area ever since. In 2001, the company expanded and took over another dealership in Mallusk, making it the largest locally-owned Vauxhall dealer in Northern Ireland.

The dealership is a family-run business which prides itself in providing the highest level of customer care. In the 2008 Vauxhall dealership survey their sales team were voted number 1 for customer satisfaction across the UK, and the after sales team voted number 1 in Northern Ireland. Ballyrobert runs an extensive new, Network Q used vehicle and motability sales operation to give its customers a wide variety of choice. These are coupled with state of the art aftercare facilities across the service, Masterfit and parts and accessories departments.

Ballyrobert has been an ADP customer since 2000 and upgraded to Autoline revision 8 in April 2007 taking the latest 9304E version earlier this year. We spoke to Graham Robinson, Finance Director, about the benefits he has gained from the upgrade.

Benefits of upgrading

"Revision 8 is much more user friendly with a number of processes being quicker and much easier to carry out. Financial routines which used to take several hours can now be done in minutes. For example, I have set up several standard journals in each dealership totalling some 400 entries, it simply requires updating each month, taking 5-10 minutes, before posting.

I invested some time in setting up the Autoline Fixed Asset Register for both sites. Any additions can be created in a few seconds and the automated depreciation process is effortless. These introductions to our system have significantly cut down the need for separate spreadsheets and nominal ledger journals.

We wanted to cut down on some of the administrative burden on sales administration. So when we upgraded we took the showroom package which meant that each salesman now produces his own quotations with part-exchange details which, when confirmed by the sales manager, means that sales administration have 90% of the data already loaded in for them to produce the invoice and square the transaction in Autoline to the deal sheet. This has speeded up the completion of the sales administration processes for the month by several days.

ADP strongly recommended the use of the Autoline Bank Reconciliation facility and although our two book-keepers took a few days getting used to daily postings from the entries from the online bank statements, the bank reconciliation is now produced on the system within a couple of days after the month end."

Graham continued, "With parts and service transactions being date driven in the Point of Sale module, it means that I can get the first set of draft accounts out two or three days after the end of the month."

The setting up of permissions and securities has moved on in Autoline, "In revision 7 this was particularly time consuming but since the upgrade, the process is much quicker and more user friendly. This allows me to give the correct access to every user and there is an audit trail of all tasks performed on the system - this was of particular interest to the auditors. I can also log on and see who is using which modules by terminal id at any given moment."

Another area which has given dealer accountants a headache in the past is the balancing of tills. Generally a dealership will have tills covering parts and service departments and with transactions taking place all day there used to be no record of the identity of who was operating the till. Now with Autoline rev8, the Till Accounts facility means that each operator has their own number which is used for every transaction. Individuals are responsible for balancing their own till at the end of the day to the print out showing the amount that they have taken in cash, cheques and credit card slips. "Our cashier says that her job is now so much easier than ever before," said Graham.

Franchise Data – a much improved process

CAP Franchise Data needs to be updated and loaded about two to three times a month. Graham commented, "The latest version of Autoline brings all prices and specifications in directly from the CAP website and uploads all the current manufacturer’s data into the system. Coupled with this, we also now upload CAP used car data and valuations into Autoline. The instant access to this information through the Showroom module allows for an immediate quotation on the customer’s part-exchange vehicle without recourse to the registration document and manual price guides." Graham added, "We have just recently added columns to our used car stock listings to give the upper and lower CAP valuations - an invaluable aid to the sales managers and dealer principal when looking at the ever fluctuating values of our used cars stock. Our auditors will also be pleased with this development as it is a critical element of their balance sheet work. If stock is overvalued it could have a disastrous effect on the net profit of the company at year end."

Remote access

Having the ability to remotely access the system at your own convenience and outside of hours is a huge benefit to anyone in the motor business. "This avoids the inconvenience of interrupting staff during business hours to log them off the system." Graham said, "If I need to move the ledgers into the next period or run an end of month process, I can log in after hours from home and do this work in a few minutes."

Data back up and document storage

"On revision 7 the back up needed to be manually set up each day, but now, Autoline is automatically backed up each night – another step forward." said Graham Document storage is also a major problem for most dealers as a lot of sensitive information needs to be retained for a number years. Ballyrobert installed scanners as part of their latest upgrade and uses the document scanning facilities within Autoline to store documents linked to purchase ledger or vehicle records. This satisfies the requirements of HMRC, auditors as well as the vehicle manufacturers.

In Summary

In these tough economic times, vehicle manufacturers and the financial institutions are looking at dealership business information more closely than ever. In particular, the monthly composite report produced through Autoline is a vital tool for both the dealer and their manufacturer(s) to make informed decisions about the business. Graham concluded, "From my point of view as the Finance Director, Autoline is now giving me the most accurate and timely information both for internal and external requirements - the system supports the business extremely well."