DMS Switching Checklist for Controllers

Everyone else gets to judge the new system on whether it feels faster. You have to prove the numbers are the same ones you had on Friday.

In a system change the sales floor judges the new software on how many clicks a deal takes. Service judges it on whether repair orders print. Both of those are visible within a day, and both get loud attention.

Your part is quieter and much harder to reverse. Whether the schedules balance. Whether the trial balance carried across truthfully. Whether payroll runs on time. Whether the sales tax return you file next month can be supported. Whether your auditors can get at last year. If any of those go wrong, they go wrong slowly and are discovered at month end, which is the worst possible moment to find out.

That asymmetry has a practical consequence. The controller has to be involved from vendor selection, not from conversion week. Almost every accounting problem in a DMS switch traces back to a decision made months earlier by somebody who did not know what it would cost the office.

What follows is written for that person. It assumes you are competent at your job and does not explain what a schedule is. It also states plainly at the outset that we are not a dealer management system. LeadLocate does not do general ledger, accounts payable or receivable, payroll, bank reconciliation, deal posting to accounting, floorplan or vehicle accounting, sales tax filing, factory reporting, parts, repair orders, or title and registration work. This page exists because our customers go through these projects and the sales side often suffers while everyone is watching accounting.

Your leverage peaks in the week before you sign, and several of these become impossible to obtain afterward.

Data ownership in writing. Not a verbal assurance. Which data is yours, in what format you can extract it, whether history comes with it, and whether extraction costs anything. Ask what a full export looks like on the day you leave, and ask both the vendor you are joining and the one you are leaving. See data ownership.

Read only access to the old system. For a defined period after cutover, at a defined price. You will need it, and negotiating it after you have given notice is expensive.

Retention obligations. Know what you are required to keep and for how long, and confirm the new arrangement satisfies it. Discovering a retention requirement after access ended is a genuinely bad situation.

Total cost with everything on. Every module you will actually enable, every user, every integration fee, every per transaction charge, and the renewal price rather than the first year price. Total cost of ownership and hidden costs cover the line items that surprise stores.

Notice periods and auto renewal on the outgoing contract. Read them before you build any timeline at all. Plenty of conversions have been delayed a year by a clause nobody checked. Exit planning and the contract checklist go through it.

Most dealership charts of accounts have accumulated a decade of expedient decisions. Accounts created for a one time situation, departments that no longer exist, two accounts doing the same job because two people set them up.

A conversion is the only realistic moment to clean that up, and the temptation is to convert it exactly as it stands because that is safest. It is safest for the weekend and expensive for the next five years.

The judgment worth making: clean up structure, preserve comparability. Consolidate genuinely duplicated accounts and retire dead ones, but do not renumber your whole chart the same month you change systems, because you will lose the ability to compare against prior years exactly when you most need it to prove the conversion worked.

Whatever you decide, document the mapping account by account and keep it. When a number looks wrong in March, the mapping is the first thing you will reach for and the only thing that will settle it.

Same discipline for factory account structures and any statement requirements you are subject to. Confirm the new system produces what your manufacturer expects before go live rather than discovering it during your first statement cycle.

This is the part where the controller's judgment is the go or no go, and it should be written into the project as such.

Before the final extraction, print or export closing figures to a form that does not depend on the old system being available. Trial balance. Every schedule. Inventory by unit with cost. Floorplan detail. Contracts in transit. Accounts receivable and payable aging. Parts inventory value. Warranty receivables. Keep them physically and digitally, and keep them somewhere that is not the system being switched off.

After the load, verify counts first, then values, then spot check individual records by hand. Do not accept the vendor's confirmation that the load succeeded as verification that it is correct. Those are different statements.

Reconcile schedule by schedule against your Friday printouts, and set a tolerance in advance rather than negotiating with yourself at 4pm on Saturday. Anything outside tolerance is a no go by prior agreement. Writing that down beforehand is the entire mechanism, because by Sunday evening you will be tired and the pressure to proceed will be enormous.

Have your outside accountants aware of the date. A conversion is much easier to unpick in week one than in month four, and they may want to see the before and after themselves. The weekend sequencing is covered on the cutover checklist.

The office is the department with the most external connections and the least visibility of them, because most were configured once and never thought about again.

Build the list four to six weeks out. Banking files including ACH and positive pay. Payroll, whether processed internally or by a service. Floorplan reporting to your lender. Lender funding uploads. Tax reporting. Manufacturer statement submission. Insurance and warranty administrators. Any expense or document management system. Any reporting feed to a group office.

For each one, record the format, the frequency, who owns the relationship, the lead time to change it, and who tests it. Then test one of each before the weekend rather than after, using a real file, because a format that is nearly right fails in a way that is discovered by somebody else's system rejecting it.

Pay particular attention to anything with a bank on the other end. A payroll file that lands in the wrong format is not an inconvenience, it is people not being paid, and it is the failure the whole store will remember.

Also inventory the reports and exports that run on a schedule and quietly feed somebody's spreadsheet. Those break silently, nobody notices for a month, and then a decision gets made from a report that stopped updating.

Conversion timing is a controller decision more than a project manager one, and getting it wrong doubles the work.

Month end is the usual choice because it gives a clean boundary, and that is generally right. Year end is usually a poor choice, because you stack a conversion on top of your heaviest close and your annual reporting obligations at once.

Avoid conflicts with tax filing deadlines, annual factory reporting, audit fieldwork and payroll year end processing. Ask specifically when the manufacturer's statement is due and whether your period would be split across two systems.

Decide how open items crossing the boundary are handled and communicate it before, not during. Work in progress in service, unposted deals, open purchase orders, parts on order and contracts in transit are the usual culprits, and each department needs to know the rule in advance.

Also plan for the reality that your first close on the new system will take longer. Two to three times longer is not unusual. Tell your general manager that in advance so it is a prediction rather than an alarming discovery, and do not schedule anything else demanding for that week.

The risk after go live is not that something breaks loudly. It is that a control quietly does not exist any more and nobody notices for a quarter.

Re establish the basics deliberately. Who can post, who can void, who can change a cost, who can issue a cheque, who can add a vendor. Permissions rarely map cleanly between systems, and the default configuration is usually more generous than yours was. Review the actual permissions, user by user, rather than reading the vendor's role descriptions.

Reconcile more often than usual for the first two months. Daily cash, daily deal posting review, weekly schedule review. It is more work and it is how you find a mapping error while it is small.

Track rework as a metric, meaning transactions that had to be corrected. It tells you where training was thin and where configuration is wrong, and it distinguishes between the two better than complaints do.

Hold a formal review at day forty five with department heads on what is still not right, and keep a visible issue list with owners from day one. Then expect the mood curve everyone goes through: adrenaline, frustration around day three, quiet complaining that the old system was better around day ten, normal by day thirty. Warning people about that in advance is worth more than it sounds.

On history, confirm early that historical records are retrievable in practice rather than in principle, by actually retrieving one.

Here is the pattern we see from outside, and it is worth a controller's attention because it lands on your numbers.

During a conversion, management attention concentrates on the office and the shop. The sales floor gets less supervision for six to eight weeks, follow up discipline slips, response times drift, and the month after go live is soft. Then everyone blames the new system, when what actually happened is that nobody was watching the floor.

The protection is straightforward. Make sure the tools the sales side depends on are not the tools being converted, and set explicit expectations that lead handling standards do not change during the project.

That is where we sit. LeadLocate runs independently and requires neither an inventory feed nor access to the dealer management system you run, which means lead distribution, texting, calling with recording and transcription, follow up processes, appointments, desking and customer facing deal pages keep working regardless of what is happening in accounting. Role based user management and a login log make access changes during a disruptive period auditable, which matters to you specifically.

Two numbers to hold the floor to during the project: time to first response, and follow up touches per lead before the trail goes cold. Both are visible in reporting, both are entirely within the store's control, and both are what actually slips during a conversion.

Questions that separate vendors quickly, and that you should ask both the one you are joining and the one you are leaving.

What exactly can I export, in what format, including history, and what does it cost? Who owns the data? What does read only access to the old system cost and for how long? What is the total monthly cost with every module we will actually use, and what is the renewal price? What is the notice period and the cancellation process? Which of our third party connections are supported today, at what cost, and who maintains them? What does the first close look like and how long does it typically take? What happens if we abort on the conversion weekend?

Insist on written answers. Vendors comfortable being pinned down in writing are usually the ones still worth having in year three.

And a note on our own scope so nothing is ambiguous. We do not sell a dealer management system, we do not convert one, and we do not do accounting, parts, service or title work. What we sell is lead generation and a CRM, month to month with no long term contract, from $199 on CRM Only and $799 for programs that include exclusive local leads. Detail on the pricing page. If you want the sales side stabilized before your conversion date, contact us and we will tell you plainly whether we help.

When should a controller get involved in a DMS switch?

At vendor selection, not at conversion week. Nearly every accounting problem in a system change traces back to a decision made months earlier by somebody who did not know what it would cost the office to live with.

Should we clean up the chart of accounts during conversion?

Clean up structure, preserve comparability. Consolidate genuinely duplicated accounts and retire dead ones, but do not renumber the whole chart the same month you change systems, or you lose the ability to compare against prior years.

What proof should we hold outside the old system?

Trial balance, every schedule, inventory by unit with cost, floorplan detail, contracts in transit, receivable and payable aging, parts value and warranty receivables, exported or printed to a form that does not require the old system to be running.

Is year end a good time to convert?

Usually not. It stacks a conversion on top of your heaviest close and your annual reporting obligations. Month end is the common choice, and the timing should also avoid tax deadlines, factory statement dates and audit fieldwork.

Does LeadLocate handle any accounting functions?

No. There is no general ledger, accounts payable or receivable, payroll, bank reconciliation, deal posting to accounting, floorplan accounting, sales tax filing, factory reporting or title work. We are a lead generation and CRM platform, not a dealer management system.

How do we stop sales performance dropping during the project?

Keep the sales tools out of the conversion and hold the floor to two published numbers throughout: time to first response and follow up touches per lead. The post conversion soft month is usually a supervision gap rather than a software problem.

See a lead and CRM stack that runs independently of your DMS, with role based access and a login log. Month to month, no long term contract.