Release notes

For most independent lots, most of the down payment arrives after the car does. That promise lived on a sticky note.

A deal can now carry any number of scheduled deferred downs — amount, due date, a note. From there:

• a reminder goes out a configurable number of days before it is due,
• a past-due notice a configurable number of days after,
• collecting one writes a real payment row, the same row the receipt prints from,
• and the dashboard carries a pending deferred downs counter.

A promise is not a payment, and the two are kept in separate places on purpose: a scheduled $12,000 cash down sitting in the payments ledger would start an IRS Form 8300 clock on money nobody has been handed.

"Is this car on CarGurus?" used to be answerable only by going to CarGurus.

Every unit's editor now has a Marketing panel:

• One row per channel — your push marketplaces and the pull feed — with a plain-English status: Published, Pending publish, Not published — marked not to post, Not published — missing information, or Not published — error, with the last published time.
• When information is missing, the exact list: no photos, no VIN, no price (with the option to post as call-for-price instead), marked sold.
• Do not post — keep a consignment or wholesale unit off every marketplace with one switch. Enforced in the feeds themselves.
• Call for price — hide the price on marketplaces while keeping it on file. Different from a missing price, and the panel tells you which is which.
• The posting-run history — when each push ran and how it went.

The dashboard strip gains Posted online / Not posted, the same numbers DealerCenter's home widget shows — and each one's Marketing panel says why.

Regular business hours have been a single open/close pair that applied to every day of the year. On exactly the days customers most want the truth — holidays — the platform got it wrong.

Settings → Organization → Special & Holiday Hours now takes exceptions:

• US federal holidays as one-click suggestions ("closed all day, every year"). Nothing is pre-filled — a row exists only when you choose it, because a wrong "closed" turns away a real customer.
• Custom days — one-off dates, closed or with override hours (open late for a sale, short hours Christmas Eve).

Everywhere that answers "are you open?" now reads them:

• The AI voice agent stops proposing appointment times on a day you're closed, and says why.
• Booking rejects times on closed days and inside override hours.
• The showroom footer shows a live status — "Open now · closes 5:00 PM" or "Closed for Thanksgiving — opens Friday 9:00 AM".
• The website chat answers the hours question with the live status.

Title tracking is the lot-operations problem every dealer has and no CRM had been carrying. The vehicle record now holds it:

• title status, state, brand, number and application number
• the dates it was received, issued, sent out and transferred
• plate number, state and expiry
• temporary permits, with the active one worked out for you

Key codes and the GPS device sit behind an owner/admin policy rather than as more columns every seat can read.

The dashboard gains a Missing Titles counter, and it reports what it does not know separately: a lot with 99 cars and no title data reads "0 missing, 99 not recorded" rather than a reassuring and meaningless zero.

Files against a unit, filed by kind: title, lien release, bill of sale, odometer statement, inspection, registration, permit, auction receipt, recon invoice, insurance.

They live in private storage and are served as short-lived links. That is not a detail: a scanned title carries a VIN, the owner's name and address, a lienholder and often a signature, and in a public bucket the URL is the credential — permanent, unauthenticated, and impossible to revoke without deleting the file.

Alongside it, a per-unit log: what changed on the vehicle, when, and who did it. The log records that a key code or GPS device id changed and never what it changed to, so it cannot hand back the values the owner/admin policy exists to protect.

Search used to be per-page: one box on inventory, another on contacts, a third on deals. Finding a car by the last six of a VIN meant knowing which page to be on first.

There is now a single search in the dashboard header. Results come back grouped:

• Inventory — year, make, model, the last six of the VIN, stock number, price and status.
• Contacts — name, phone, and when you last spoke.
• Deals — number, vehicle, buyer, status and date.

Each group has a "see all" that opens the full, pre-filtered list. There is also a search deleted contacts link, because the most common reason a contact "disappeared" is that somebody archived it.

It is backed by one database function scoped to your organization, so a search never reaches another dealership's records.

Lead source was already tracked on every contact. What was missing was the other half of the arithmetic: what the source costs.

Record a monthly cost per source and the insights page fills in the rest — leads, units sold, cost per lead, and cost per sale, side by side. There is a dashboard widget for the same figures.

This is the report that answers "should I renew this vendor", which is a question no amount of lead-count reporting can settle on its own.

The home page now opens on the day's worklist rather than a summary nobody acted on.

Yours: new prospects, follow-ups, unread inbox, today's appointments, new credit applications, active deposits.

The store's: pending deals in the last 30 days, submitted in the last 7, lender decisions in the last 7, contracts in transit, pending deferred downs.

Every number reads as mine / dealership and every one is a link to the pre-filtered list behind it.

One deliberate detail: a counter that cannot be computed says so instead of showing a zero. "Nothing to do" and "we cannot tell you" are different answers, and a dashboard that confuses them is one people stop trusting.

Every one of these events was already being emitted. There was simply no way to say who should hear about it, so the answer was "everyone, or nobody".

Settings → Notifications now lists each event with a one-line description and a receiver picker:

• new lead
• task due
• new email, new SMS, and message delivery status
• SMS consent received
• stips uploaded
• deferred down due
• lender decision
• deal marked sold

Receivers can be individual people or whole roles, so a new hire inherits the right alerts on their first day instead of being added to nine lists by hand.