Desking, F&I, and paperwork
Everything that happens after the customer says yes
Stock the car, desk the deal, sell the products, produce the whole jacket, and get it signed — from one system, with the numbers computed once. Built for independent used-car dealers who need the back half of a dealership to work without buying a franchise-sized platform to get it.
What this is, and what it is not
This is not a full dealer management system, and we will not call it one. There is no general ledger, no electronic DMV filing, and no buy-here-pay-here note servicing. If you carry your own paper or you keep your books inside your DMS, you will still need that system.
What this is: the working half of a retail store. Inventory with real cost in it, a desking engine that does finance and lease properly, an F&I module, the full document set with remote signing, the statutory clocks, and a clean handoff to your bookkeeper. For an independent lot selling retail on bank paper, that covers most of the day — and it is wired to the same CRM answering your phone, which no standalone desking tool can say.
The lot
Stock it in under a minute
Scan the VIN off the windshield with a phone camera and the year, make, model, and trim decode themselves from the federal database. Add photos, asking price, and cost. A trade you just took can be posted straight to the lot as a live unit.
Every dollar you have in the car
A reconditioning ledger per vehicle: category, vendor, amount, date. Recon rolls into the cost basis automatically, so the gross the desk shows you is the gross after the detailer and the tyres, not before. Cost is hidden from sales staff and never appears on a customer document.
Aging you can act on
Days in stock on every unit, with aging buckets, averages, and an over-sixty list in the lot report. Where the number is a floor rather than an exact date — imported units carry the day the feed first saw them — the report says so instead of quietly rounding in its own favour.
The desk
A real four-square, not a payment calculator with a dealership skin. It is also the engine the contract prints from, so the deal you desk and the deal the customer signs cannot drift apart.
Five ways to write it
Finance, lease, cash, outside finance, and wholesale. Lease is a real money-factor and residual model with cap cost reduction, acquisition and disposition fees, and three different lease tax methods — not a finance payment with a different label on it.
Front gross, back gross, honestly
Front is net of pack, recon, and any overallowance you handed the customer on their trade. Back is reserve plus product spread. The worksheet tells you when the trade allowance is running ahead of actual cash value rather than letting it quietly eat the deal.
Solve it backwards
Enter the payment the customer needs, or the gross you need, and the desk shows which single lever gets there — term, cash down, price, or trade — with the effect of each one priced out. Plus a payment grid across your terms and down payments to work from on the phone.
Checked against your lenders
Load each lender program once — buy rate by credit tier, max term, advance limit, back-end cap, payment-to-income ceiling, vehicle age and mileage rules — and the desk flags a structure that busts before you promise it. Reserve is calculated by that lender rule, whichever of the three methods they use.
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F&I
Credit application, taken safely
Send the customer a secure link or take it from your own website. They fill it in themselves and sign it. Social Security number, date of birth, and licence number are encrypted before they hit the database, hidden from every list and screen, and only decrypted for the printed application — with an access log entry each time.
Products priced into the payment
Your menu of service contracts, GAP, and warranty with cost and retail on each. Attach them to the deal and they price into the payment and into back gross with the right tax treatment. Attach rates are tracked against benchmarks so you can see which products the store is actually selling.
Compliance you can show a regulator
Truth in Lending disclosures computed by the same engine that prints the contract, so the box and the contract cannot disagree. Itemization of the amount financed, the credit score disclosure on financed deals, the privacy notice, and an adverse action notice on a decline. A fair-lending report flags any deal where the rate markup ran past your cap.
Cash reporting, flagged before it bites
Payments toward a deal are logged with method and reference, and the system watches the cash total across the whole deal. When it crosses the federal ten thousand dollar line it raises the Form 8300 flag with the fifteen-day due date. You file it; the software makes sure you know you have to.
The paperwork
The whole jacket in one click
Around thirty document types generated from the deal itself, so nothing is re-keyed and nothing disagrees. Buyer order, retail installment contract, FTC Buyers Guide, federal odometer statement, as-is disclaimer, damage disclosure, privacy notice, we-owe, arbitration, bill of sale, title application. Print the lot as one bundle.
Real state forms, not lookalikes
Washington DOL and DOR forms are filled programmatically into the actual government PDFs — title application, report of sale, bill of sale, release of interest, the nonresident certificates. Where a field needs a decision the system has no business making for you, it is left blank for you to complete rather than guessed.
Signed remotely, and provably
Send a secure link and the customer signs from their phone. Each signature stores the signer name, timestamp, IP address, device, and a fingerprint of the exact document version signed — so a later edit cannot silently become the thing they agreed to. Links expire on their own.
Deadlines that do not slip
Report of sale, title application, and temporary permit expiry are tracked per deal with the statutory clock frozen at delivery, alongside anything you owe the customer on a we-owe. A filings queue across every open deal, so nothing ages into a penalty.
State title and registration paperwork is Washington today. The federal layer — Buyers Guide, odometer statement, Truth in Lending, privacy notice, and the retail installment contract — applies wherever you sell.
A clean handoff to your bookkeeper
Turn a month of deliveries into balanced journal entries in your own account names — cost of sale, trade payoffs, F&I income, finance reserve, and sales tax already split out — and import one file into QuickBooks instead of re-keying the month. Deals with no cost entered are held back and flagged rather than exported at a hundred percent margin.
This is a bridge to your books, not a set of books. That boundary is deliberate and we intend to keep it.
What it does not do
Better to read this now than to discover it after you have moved your store:
- It is not a general ledger. There is no chart of accounts, no trial balance, no month-end close, and no financial statements — that stays in your accounting package, on purpose.
- It does not file with the DMV electronically. It fills and tracks the paperwork; a human still submits it. Washington has no dealer electronic titling programme to connect to.
- It does not service buy-here-pay-here notes. No payment book, no delinquency queue, no collections. If you carry your own paper, you need something else for the servicing.
- It does not submit credit applications to lenders. There is no RouteOne or Dealertrack connection, and no credit bureau pull — you record what the bank came back with.
- It does not pull live book values. No KBB, Black Book, NADA, or Manheim feed. Your appraiser enters the number.
- It does not take a card or ACH payment from a car buyer. It records the money the store was handed and prints a receipt.
- It does not calculate commissions or pay plans, manage floor plan lines, or print window stickers.
Frequently asked
Is Lead Friendly a DMS?
Not in the full sense of the word, and we would rather say so plainly than have you find out in month two. There is no general ledger, no electronic DMV filing, and no buy-here-pay-here note servicing — three things a full dealer management system is expected to have. What there is: inventory with cost and reconditioning, a genuine desking engine, F&I, the complete document set with e-signing, statutory filing deadlines, and a journal export for your bookkeeper. For a lot doing retail sales on bank paper, that is most of the day. For a buy-here-pay-here store carrying its own notes, it is not enough on its own.
Do I have to leave my current DMS?
No, and many dealers should not. If your DMS is doing your books and your titling adequately, keep it and use us for the parts it does badly — the phone, the follow-up, the website, and the desk. We do not have a data pipe into DealerCenter or Frazer, so running both means some duplicate entry; whether that trade is worth it depends on how much the lead side is costing you today.
Which states does the paperwork cover?
The state-specific paperwork is Washington today. The Washington DOL and DOR forms are the real government PDFs, filled programmatically, and the tax and fee stack is built to Washington statute with the rules cited. The federal layer applies anywhere: the FTC Buyers Guide, the federal odometer statement, Truth in Lending disclosures, the privacy notice, and the retail installment contract. So a dealer outside Washington gets the desk, the F&I module, the contract, and the federal forms, but supplies their own state title and registration paperwork. We say this rather than implying fifty-state coverage we have not built.
Can I run my dealership accounting in it?
No. You can turn a month of deliveries into balanced journal entries in your own account names — cost of sale, trade payoffs, F&I income, finance reserve, and sales tax already split out — and import one file into QuickBooks instead of re-keying the month. That is a bridge to your books, not a replacement for them, and the system is deliberately built not to grow into one. Balances, payables, reconciliation, and statements belong in your accounting package.
How does the desking engine handle tax and fees?
Your store rate and standard fees are configured once and applied to every deal, with each fee marked taxable or not and included in or excluded from the finance charge correctly. Trade tax credit, tax-exempt deals, and three separate lease tax methods are all modelled. For Washington there is a dated statutory fee schedule with the authority cited, and fees that genuinely cannot be estimated in advance — plate, weight, county surcharges — are named and left out rather than guessed at.
Can the customer sign from home?
Yes. Documents generate with a secure link that expires, the customer signs on their phone, and the record keeps the signer name, timestamp, IP address, browser, and a fingerprint of the exact version they signed. It is a typed legal name with consent, not a drawn signature, and there is one signer per document — worth knowing if you routinely have co-buyers sign remotely.
Will the numbers on the contract match the desk?
Yes, by construction rather than by discipline. The documents render from a frozen snapshot of the deal as computed by the engine, and the printed Truth in Lending figures come from that same engine rather than being recalculated by the printer. There is an automated test in the codebase whose only job is to fail if the printed numbers ever drift from the desked ones.
Does the customer ever see my cost or gross?
No. Cost, pack, reserve, and gross are barred from every customer-facing document, and cost is stripped from what sales staff can see at all. The AI copilot is under the same rule and will not state your cost or a gross figure to a customer under any phrasing.
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Try Lead Friendly free for 7 days
AI voice agents + CRM + TCPA-gated compliance. 30 minutes included. No card required.