Switching From AutoManager: A Migration Guide

A platform change at an independent store is a project, not a purchase. The stores that come through it cleanly decide the hard things before they give notice.

AutoManager is known publicly as a family of products for independent dealers rather than a single application. A given store might use their back end system for inventory and deal paperwork, their desking piece, their website product, or several of those together. Some stores also run pieces of their business in spreadsheets alongside it and forget that until the conversion exposes it.

The first working session of any migration should produce a written inventory of what you are on. List every function the current setup performs, name the system that performs it, and mark whether it is moving, staying or being retired. Do this with the people who actually touch the work, not just the owner, because the office manager knows about the report nobody else remembers exists.

The reason this matters is that most exits are partial. Plenty of stores discover during this exercise that only two of six functions are actually the problem, and that replacing everything to fix two is expensive risk for no reason. Verify current product capability and terms with the vendor directly, since packaging changes and no comparison page including this one stays accurate forever.

If you have not yet decided whether to move at all, the trade offs are laid out on our AutoManager alternative page.

Your leverage is at its maximum before you cancel and at zero afterward. Every data question has to be answered while you are still a paying customer in good standing.

Get written answers to all of these. What exactly can be exported, field by field, and in what format. Does the export include customer notes and communication history or only contact records. Are completed deals included, and in what form. What about scanned or attached documents. How long does your access continue after cancellation, and can it be extended for a fee. Is there a charge for the export itself.

Then do the thing almost nobody does: run a test export now, before you have committed to anything. A sample file tells you more in twenty minutes than a support conversation will in a week. You will find out whether the field names are usable, whether the dates come out in a sane format, and whether the notes field is one line or the whole history.

Keep archives regardless of what the new vendor promises to import. A read only copy of your old records, in a format you can open in five years, is cheap insurance against a question from a customer, an auditor or a lawyer. Our data export checklist lists the fields to insist on.

If the piece you are leaving produces your deal paperwork, this section is the most important one on the page. Everything else in a conversion is inconvenient. Getting forms wrong is a compliance problem.

State specific documents, retail installment contracts, buyers guides, disclosure forms, power of attorney, odometer statements and whatever your market requires all have to exist correctly in the new system, print correctly on your printers, and be signed correctly by your people. That last part is not automatic. A form that is technically present but prints misaligned on the tray your office uses will stop deliveries on a Saturday.

Plan it as its own workstream with its own owner and its own deadline ahead of go live. Print every form you use, on the actual hardware, and have your finance manager and office manager review them side by side against the current output. Do not accept a vendor's assurance that your state is supported without seeing your specific documents come out of your specific printer.

This is also the single most common reason stores decide to keep the incumbent for paperwork and change only the customer facing layer. That is a legitimate outcome, not a failure of nerve.

The order matters more than the calendar. A workable sequence for an independent store looks like this.

1. Decide scope. The written inventory of what moves and what stays, signed off by the owner.
2. Test exports. Pull sample data now, review it, find the gaps while you can still ask.
3. Clean the data. Duplicates, dead records, wrong phone formats and stale inventory. Migrating garbage costs more than deleting it. See data cleanup before migration.
4. Build and test forms. Longest lead time, start earliest, finish before anything else.
5. Configure the new system. Users, roles, permissions, routing rules, templates. Decide the permission model before you load users, not after.
6. Train, then run parallel. Train on the configured system with your own data, not on a demo tenant.
7. Cut over on a slow day. Never on a weekend, never at month end, never during a sale event.
8. Give notice. Only after the new system has carried real work.

The mistake almost every store makes is doing step eight around step three, because a renewal date is coming and somebody wants to save a month of overlap. That saved month is the most expensive month in the project.

Running both systems for a period is the only reliable way to find out what you missed. It costs a few weeks of double subscription and it saves conversions.

Define what parallel means before you start, because ambiguity here produces the worst of both. A workable version: all new customer activity happens in the new system from day one, deals in flight finish in the old one, and the old system stays available read only for lookups and reporting. Everyone gets told which is which in a single sentence they can repeat.

Watch three things during the parallel period. Whether leads and phone traffic are landing where they should, since misrouted opportunity is the most expensive failure and the least visible. Whether your people are actually using the new system or quietly reverting. And whether the numbers reconcile, meaning the same week produces comparable counts in both places.

Two to four weeks is typical for a single rooftop. Longer than six weeks usually means the team has decided not to commit, and extending the overlap will not fix that. Our page on running two systems during migration covers the mechanics.

From conversions we have watched, in rough order of frequency.

Leads stop arriving and nobody notices for three days. Every third party provider, your website forms, your chat vendor and your marketplace listings post to a destination that has to be repointed. Make the list of every source before you start, not during, and check each one on go live morning.

Phone traffic disappears from the record. If calls were tracked in the old setup and the new arrangement is not live yet, an entire channel goes dark. Sort voice before cutover, not after.

Notes did not come across. The export included contacts but the history was truncated. This is discovered by a salesperson looking at a customer they have been working for two months. Test it during the sample export.

A form prints wrong on Saturday. Covered above, and it is why forms finish first.

The team reverts. Under pressure, people go back to what they know, including personal cell phones. That is a management problem with a management fix, and it needs a named owner watching daily during the first two weeks.

The hidden costs are catalogued further on hidden costs of switching systems.

Whatever is happening in the back office, the floor still has to sell cars this month. Protecting that is a deliberate act.

Keep the customer facing layer stable while the back end changes. If your lead flow, texting, calling and follow up live in a system that is not part of the conversion, then the conversion cannot break them, and your salespeople keep working normally while the office deals with paperwork. This is one of the strongest arguments for separating the two layers permanently rather than only during a migration.

Assign a single point of contact for questions during the change, and make it somebody who will actually answer. The alternative is fourteen people improvising, which is how bad habits become permanent. Hold a five minute standup every morning for the first two weeks, ask what broke yesterday, and fix it that day.

Communicate to customers only what they need to know, which is usually nothing. A store telling shoppers it is in the middle of a system change is a store giving them a reason to wait. Just make sure the phone gets answered and the texts get returned.

Rough, and it varies with how much is moving.

Weeks one and two: scope decision, vendor selection finished, test exports pulled and reviewed, forms workstream started.

Weeks three through five: data cleanup, form building and printer testing, new system configuration including users, roles and routing rules.

Week six: training on your own configured data, and a full dry run of a deal from lead to paperwork.

Weeks seven through nine: parallel run. New activity in the new system, deals in flight finishing in the old, daily checks on lead routing.

Week ten: notice given, archives pulled and stored, old system access confirmed in writing for the read only period.

If a vendor tells you this can be done in a weekend, ask them specifically about forms and about your lead sources. If a vendor tells you it takes six months for a single independent rooftop, ask what is actually consuming that time. Both answers are worth hearing before you sign.

Plainly, so nobody is surprised in month two. LeadLocate is not a dealer management system. We do not do general ledger, accounts payable or receivable, payroll, bank reconciliation, deal posting to accounting, floorplan accounting, sales tax filing, title and registration processing, parts, or repair orders. If you are leaving a back office platform, you need a back office platform, and this page exists to help you choose one well rather than to sell you a substitute.

What we replace is the customer layer. Where opportunities come from, meaning exclusive local buyer leads and opt in seller leads from owners who filled out a vehicle offer request. How the team communicates: SMS and MMS, RCS with automatic SMS fallback, a VoIP softphone with click to call, call recording with transcription, voicemail drop, email with a real inbox, bulk email. How follow up runs: automations, follow up processes, drip campaigns, appointments and reminders. How the desk works a payment: loan and lease with a fifty state tax matrix, trade credit caps and three lease tax methods. Plus lead pages, salesperson websites, a live chat widget, an email validator, a phone validator and three reporting layers.

Because no connection to the back office system is required to operate, that layer can be stood up before, during or after your conversion without adding risk to it. Pricing is published and month to month: CRM Only at $199, lead programs from $799. Details on the pricing page, or contact us and we will tell you honestly which parts of your project we have nothing to do with.

Can LeadLocate replace AutoManager entirely?

No. We are not a dealer management system, so inventory records, deal paperwork, forms, accounting and title work stay with a back office platform. We replace the customer layer: lead generation, communication, follow up, desking and reporting.

What should we do before giving notice?

Run a test export and review the actual file, get written answers on what can be exported and how long access continues, build and print every form on your real hardware, and carry real work in the new system during a parallel run. Notice comes last.

How long does a migration take for an independent store?

Roughly eight to ten weeks when forms are moving, with the form workstream starting first because it has the longest lead time. Less if you are only changing the customer facing layer, since no back office data has to move.

What is the most common failure during a conversion?

Lead sources posting to the old destination after cutover, and nobody noticing for days. Make a written list of every provider, website form, chat vendor and marketplace before you start, then check each one on go live morning.

Should we run both systems at once?

Yes, for two to four weeks. New activity in the new system, deals in flight finishing in the old, and the old one available read only for lookups. Cutting over with no overlap is how stores lose opportunities during a change.

Can we change only the customer side and keep our back office?

Yes, and many stores do exactly that. No integration or inventory feed is required to operate our platform, so it can run alongside whatever handles your paperwork. Keep one system as the record of truth for the conversation and one for the deal file.

Stand up the customer layer before your conversion starts and your team keeps selling through it. Published pricing, month to month, no long term contract. Call 844-376-2274.