29 crowd-sourced dealership best practices to combat the CDK Global outages

I asked you all on LinkedIn, X, and Instagram to send me your best practices for navigating the CDK Global cybersecurity fallout… and boy, did you guys deliver. I hand-picked these best practices from over 300 replies and comments. Further down, you’ll also find a list of vendors doing some pretty remarkable things to support the dealer community. This is a living, breathing document that will grow and change over time with your input. 

1. “Call the lenders, they will work with you on accuracy and completion. They need these deals too. Stop the 1-pays ‘spotting.’ We have also been using separate softwares to complete deals. So not a one stop shop but there is a way to NOT be forced to spot. I’m talking about hanging paper. We are calling every lender and getting exact numbers now and they are working with us to have it hung before the customer leaves the lot.”

— April Ancira, Vice President of Ancira Auto Group

2. “We are doing all econtracts in RouteOne. Paying floorplan off the sales log. Closing June is going to be the real trick if CDK comes back online.”

— X user @karla32257

3. “We have uploaded all our documents less econtracts (route1 Honda IN) as a pdf fillable version. This is the most efficient way to get the deal done. We can push from Vinsolution to route1 and expedite the econtract as much as possible and fill in the blanks. Everyone from sales to desk to finance and helping the process move along. Since the hack we have sold more cars each day and have gotten more efficient each day.”

— Jason Gilles, General Sales Manager at Fred Beans Honda

4. “If you have a grey hair GM like myself you started with a pen, moved to finance with a pen. No excuses… You can execute finance contracts through routeone, dealertrack. This is how it was prior to 1990. Write service, sell cars and find solutions to deliver.”

— X user @Carpe

5. “I pulled an old deal and made copies of every CDK laser form. Whiteout/cleared any customer or vehicle info and scanned them into a PDF file. We edit the pdf file by typing in all the fields and then print it out. 

We also sat down and made sure that everyone sales manager and finance manager knew what to fill out on the state forms.”

– David Hetzel, General Manager at Fred Beans Ford of Boyertown

6. “Managers somehow printed out leads we have open for the month so we are able to call/email.

I have notifications on my phone from the leads I transferred into my name/text conversations. Just texted from my personal number and picked up where we left off.”

– Instragm user @kiarashante

5. “We are generating spot buy econs in RouteOne to generate accurate federal truth in lending statements, printing out, and hand writing on carbon from RICs for banks that don’t accept econtracts.”

– Michael L. Wood, General Manager of Jaguar and Land Rover of Virginia Beach and Checkered Flag Volkswagen

7. “Receipt numbers instead of deal numbers! Dealertrack to desk numbers – snippet of it for disclosures. Blank bill of sale and hand writing everything in. Writing out on a word doc the details of the deal (costs, profit, sales person, fees, sale prices, etc..)”

– Radu Stoica, Sales Manager at Sherwood Park Hyundai

9. “Good ol’ data entry. Using Darwin to structure the deal and then hand building contracts in Dealertrack to econtract. Hand typing purchase orders and all ancillary products and forms. We’ve got the process down to about 50 minutes. Not ideal but it is what it is.”

– X user @NEOYUPPIE

9. “We fine tuned setups for our desking tools in our CRM and at least for VinSolutions, it has been accurate. We have sales screenshot the desking breakdown and provide to finance to key in figures for digital contracts and get funded … 

10. We built an excel template to generate parts invoices on our actual CDK templates to make it simpler to re-enter when CDK comes up and make sure we are accounting for taxes properly. We use dealerlogix to generate invoices similar to repair orders, we entered all RO disclaimers into the system. We setup all cashiers with direct access to our merchant gateway and were able to turn on and provide cash and check receipts through the gateway so we can take all forms of payments.”

– X user @JeremiahComer6

11. “I am using filter app books to get the correct filter numbers. I use a form that list parts and prices out, multiply them by the tax rate to get parts taken care of. And I’m using all data for labor times and multiplying it by hourly rate putting that on a separate line then multiplying the labor times our shop sippy percentage. Getting it all together getting a signature on that from the first and we are calling in their cc numbers to get auth. Yes, it’s time consuming but keeps my guys going.”

– James Beal, Technician, Bill Colwell Ford

12. “If you only have CDK only for DMS, your service tools can pre-write and communicate between service and parts as well as collect payment from clients. (My Karma, Dealer Logix etc.) Spreadsheet parts tracking for reconciliation at a later date. Hand written RO’s with manual punch times for warranty.”

– Instagram user @tncarguy78

13. “Hand writing repair orders. Customers are signing credit card authorizations. Spreadsheet for repair orders to track flat rate hours. Spreadsheet for parts to track inventory. All databases that require a repair order # we are using last 8 of VIN.”

– X user aaron_rudin

14. “As with others, we’re handwriting repair orders. Excel spreadsheets for dispatching, parts, and payments. Writers and techs are all getting a guarantee, once we can write ROs and book em out we get paid our normal flat rate / commission on them.”

– X user @JoeTheAutoPro

15. “Parts Manager here for a Benz dealer. We are utilizing myKaarma to ‘bill out parts’ so service knows what to charge the customer, once CDK comes back we will copy the parts onto real RO.  Using revparts to bill out wholesale/retail customers so they can have some sort of an invoice. Will make proper invoices when CDK is up. It will be a lot of backlog when CDK is backup but we are managing with the best of our ability.”

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