Switching From Frazer DMS: A Migration Guide

A back office conversion is the most disruptive project a small store can take on. Done in the right order it is survivable.

Before any of the logistics, spend an hour on the diagnosis, because a large share of back office conversions are undertaken to fix something a back office conversion cannot fix.

Frazer is a dealer management system for independent used car dealers. It handles deal entry and posting, accounting, inventory records, buy here pay here note servicing, forms and title paperwork. If your complaint is about one of those functions, a conversion is a reasonable answer.

If your complaint is that leads are not being worked, that follow up dies after two touches, that nobody knows which advertising produced anything, or that your salespeople are running the business from personal cell phones, then you are looking at the wrong system. None of that is back office work and no back office product will fix it. What you need is a CRM and a lead layer, which is a much smaller and less disruptive purchase. Our Frazer alternative page draws the line between the two.

Write your reasons down before you shop, in one sentence each, and check whether each one is genuinely a back office function. This single exercise saves a meaningful number of stores from a project they did not need.

And if the diagnosis holds, be realistic about the size of it. A conversion touches accounting, inventory, paperwork, staff habits and month end. Do not schedule it in your busiest quarter.

This is the step stores skip and regret. Your leverage with an incumbent vendor is highest before you announce you are leaving, and your data question should be answered while you are still a customer in good standing.

Ask, in writing, exactly what you can export and in what format. Then list it by category rather than accepting a general yes: customers and contacts, vehicle and inventory records with cost detail, deal records with the full structure, accounting history and the general ledger, note and payment history if you carry paper, forms and completed documents, tax records, and anything a state or lender requires you to retain.

Then ask what it costs, how long it takes, and how long you keep access after cancellation. Do not assume that a report you can view on screen is a file you can extract. A PDF is a picture of your data, not your data.

Separately, plan an archive. Some history never migrates cleanly and does not need to, but you are still required to be able to produce it. Many stores keep a read only copy of the old system, or a full export set on their own storage, for the retention period their state and their accountant require. Decide that deliberately rather than discovering it during an audit. See DMS data ownership and migrating historical records.

The conversion plan is only as good as the inventory of connections, and almost nobody has that list written down.

Walk the store and write down every place data enters or leaves. Your website and its inventory feed. Listing sites that publish your cars. Any third party lead sources posting into a system. Lenders and their portals. Your payment processor. Your accountant's access and whatever they import. Your forms provider. Your insurance and floor plan reporting. The phone system. The CRM. Anything a manager built in a spreadsheet that quietly became load bearing.

For each one, record three things: who owns the connection, what breaks if it stops for a day, and who has to be told about the change. That third column is the one that saves you, because a conversion where the lender finds out on Monday is a conversion that costs you deals.

Pay particular attention to anything that feeds your listings, because a gap in inventory syndication is invisible internally and extremely visible to shoppers. If your vehicles vanish from the listing sites for four days in the middle of the month, you will feel it two weeks later and nobody will connect it to the conversion. The DMS migration checklist has the full inventory template.

Conversions fail on ordering more often than on technology. The sequence below is the one that holds up in a small store where the same three people do everything.

Weeks one and two. Diagnosis, vendor selection, and the export question answered in writing. Nothing is signed until you know what leaves with you.

Weeks three and four. Data extraction and a first test import. Expect the first pass to be wrong. That is what it is for.

Weeks five and six. Cleanup. Duplicates, dead records, customers with no owner, inventory that sold two years ago. Do this before the final import, not after, because bad data imported is bad data you now live with. See data migration.

Weeks seven and eight. Configuration and training, with the people who will actually use it, on your own records rather than a demo set.

Cutover. Early in a month, never at month end, never on a Friday, and never in your busiest season. Give yourself a full weekday with the vendor available.

The month after. Reconciliation and cleanup, which is real work and needs to be somebody's job rather than everybody's spare time. A realistic timeline is in DMS conversion timeline.

There are two philosophies and the right answer depends on what you carry, not on preference.

A hard cutover means the old system stops and the new one starts on a defined date. It is cleaner, cheaper and faster, and it works for smaller stores with simple deal structures and no in house paper. The risk is that anything missed is discovered live.

A parallel run means both systems carry activity for a period, usually a month, and you reconcile them against each other. It costs double for that window and it doubles data entry, which staff hate. It is close to mandatory if you carry your own notes, because a payment posted to the wrong system is a customer relations problem and potentially a compliance one.

The middle path most independents actually take: hard cutover on new deal activity, parallel on accounting for one close, and read only retention of the old system for history. That keeps the double entry burden to one department for one month instead of the whole store for two. More at parallel run conversion and the cutover checklist.

Whichever you choose, write down what you will check to declare the conversion successful, before you start. Deal counts match, inventory count matches, balances tie, note payments reconcile. Vague success criteria mean the project never formally ends.

The subscription difference is usually the smallest number in a conversion. The expensive parts are the ones that do not appear on a quote.

Staff time is the big one. Somebody has to extract, clean, verify and reconcile, and in a small store that somebody is already fully occupied. Count those hours honestly, because pretending they are free is how a conversion runs three months long.

Then the productivity dip. Expect two to four weeks where everything takes longer, mistakes go up, and morale dips. It is normal and it passes, but it is real and it lands during a period when you also have cars to sell. Budget management attention for it rather than assuming enthusiasm covers it.

Then the small ones that add up: overlap fees for the parallel period, migration labor charged by the new vendor, integration rebuild on the connections you mapped earlier, new hardware or peripherals, printed forms that have to be reordered, and the archive storage you now maintain for the old system. Our page on hidden costs of switching itemizes these.

None of this is an argument against converting. It is an argument for converting once, deliberately, with the real number in front of you.

A conversion is only finished when people use the new system correctly without being watched, and that is a management project rather than a software one.

Train on your own data, never on the vendor's demo database, because the moment that matters is when someone hits your actual weird deal structure and the training example does not cover it. Train by role rather than in one large session, since your office manager and your salespeople need almost nothing in common. Record the sessions for the people you hire in month eight, and assume you will hire someone in month eight.

Pick one internal owner. Not a committee. One person who knows where things are and who everybody asks, with the authority to decide the small conventions that otherwise get decided eleven different ways in the first fortnight.

Then plan a check in at thirty days, when the questions have changed from how do I to why does it. That is the session that fixes bad habits before they set. A structured plan is in the training plan.

Expect at least one person to resist genuinely, not out of stubbornness but because they were fast in the old system and are now slow. Naming that out loud helps more than pretending it is not happening.

Here is the argument this page exists to make, and it is a practical one rather than a sales pitch.

During a back office conversion, the last thing you want is your lead flow, follow up and customer communication depending on the system being replaced. If those live inside the back office, everything goes quiet at exactly the moment your team is distracted and the store can least afford it.

Our platform runs independently. No access to the dealer management system you run is required and no inventory feed is required to operate. The lead inbox, the texting, the calling, the follow up processes, the campaigns and the desking all keep working regardless of what happens in the office. Deals still get structured, loan or lease, with the correct tax for your state, and the customer still gets a deal page they can read and sign on their phone. The salesperson never has to know a conversion is underway.

That is why several of our independent stores put the sales layer in place first, before a back office project rather than after it. It gives the store a stable front end while the disruptive change happens behind it, and it means the follow up that pays for the conversion does not stop during the conversion. See CRM for independent dealers.

Cutover week is mostly about having decided things in advance. A short list of what the calm conversions have that the ugly ones do not.

A named owner who is not also selling cars that week. A written rollback position, meaning what you do if the import is wrong on Tuesday morning, even if the answer is that you carry on and fix forward. Vendor contacts for both the old and new systems with direct numbers, not a ticket portal. A verified final export of the old system, on your own storage, that somebody has actually opened. Printed or offline copies of the forms you cannot sell a car without. And a communication note to your lenders, your accountant and anyone who feeds you leads, sent before the date rather than after it.

Then the checks: deal counts, inventory count and cost totals, balances, note payment history if you carry paper, and a spot check on twenty customer records chosen at random rather than the twenty the vendor shows you.

We cannot guarantee how any conversion goes, since most of it depends on your data and the vendor you choose. What we can tell you is where our line sits: we do not sell a dealer management system, and we do not replace one. We are the lead, CRM, communication and desking layer that keeps producing while the rest changes. Pricing starts at $199 a month for CRM Only, month to month with no long term contract, on the pricing page. Call 844-376-2274 or contact us.

Can LeadLocate replace Frazer as our DMS?

No. We do not provide accounting, deal posting, forms, title work or note servicing, and we do not sell a dealer management system. We provide the lead, CRM, communication and desking layer that runs alongside whichever back office system you choose.

How long does a DMS conversion take for an independent store?

Plan on roughly eight to twelve weeks from decision to a stable cutover, plus a month of reconciliation afterward. Stores that compress it usually pay for the time later in cleanup, and stores that convert at month end regret it.

What data should we insist on exporting?

Customers, vehicles with cost detail, full deal records, accounting and general ledger history, note and payment history if you carry paper, completed forms, and tax records. Ask in writing, by category, and confirm the format before you give notice.

Should we run both systems in parallel?

If you carry your own paper, close to mandatory for at least one accounting close. If you do not, a hard cutover on new deals with a read only archive of the old system is usually enough and much cheaper in staff hours.

When is the worst time to cut over?

Month end, a Friday, and your busiest selling season. Aim for early in a month, midweek, in a slower period, with vendor support available the same day rather than the next business day.

How do we keep selling during the conversion?

Keep the lead, communication and desking layer independent of the system being replaced. Our platform needs no back office access and no inventory feed to operate, so lead flow, texting, calling, follow up and desking continue while the office side changes.

Lead flow, texting, calling, follow up and desking that keep running through a conversion, with no back office access required. Month to month, no long term contract.