Welcome to another installment of "Winning with ProfitTime," the video series designed to help you and your team get the most out of vAuto's one-of-a-kind used inventory management solution.

In this episode, we will discuss ProfitTime’s Pricing Alignment Box — a never-before-available set of insights — that helps you not only price each vehicle to sell in its optimum time frame, but also keeps your whole inventory aligned to deliver its highest possible ROI.

By seeing how often a particular manager is following ProfitTime’s pricing recommendations, and which cars they tend to price lower or higher than that recommendation, you can fine-tune your pricing strategy to strike a balance between selling for volume, and selling for gross profit.

It’s one of the software’s most insightful tools, and is particularly useful when trying to manage pricing across multiple rooftops. So let’s get started.

You can find the Pricing Alignment box in the “Vehicles Summary” homepage.

The box is sorted by ProfitTime metal value, how many vehicles were priced above or below ProfitTime’s recommended range, and by how often you’re pricing vehicles inside the range, represented with a percentage.

You can see this manager's overall aligned percentage at the bottom of the table, 51 percent. This manager is staying inside the recommended price range a little over half of the time.

However, it also tells you that 49 percent of the time, this manager is choosing to price vehicles outside the system’s recommended range.

It’s important to note that ProfitTime’s recommendations are not designed to tell managers how to sell cars. It’s their right to accept or reject any recommendation.

But, what the alignment box is designed to tell you is a manager’s overall pricing tendencies, and how they might be affecting your ROI.

For example, we see here that this manager tends to price vehicles above the recommended range. That tells us he or she is gross-minded. Now, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to get the most gross profit out of a vehicle by pricing it higher.

But again, the alignment box simply allows you to see the mindset of your managers, and analyze their pricing at your own discretion. In this instance, we might ask: “am I missing out on sales volume because of this manager's tendency to price high?”

Conversely, we see this other manager tends to price vehicles below the recommended range. We’d then want to ask ourselves if we’re selling cars at a larger volume, at the expense of leaving some gross profit on the table.

Now, if we take a look at this third manager's alignment box, we get a very interesting insight only this tool can deliver.

Let’s start by looking at what’s happening in each of our ProfitTime metal classifications.

We see that when it comes to our Platinum and Gold cars, or cars with the highest-investment value, this manager often prices below the recommended range. But for our Silver and Bronze cars, those with the lowest investment-value, this manager is pricing above the recommendation.

What we see here is a very common way managers have priced used vehicles in the past, without the ProfitTime investment-value method.

These Bronze and Silver cars are being priced above the recommendation, because the manager can sense they own the cars for too much money. To price them within the recommendation would likely result in taking a loss on that vehicle. Understandably, managers don’t want to do that.

However, since these Bronze and Silver cars aren’t gaining in value by sitting on our lot at higher price, it is worth considering pricing them lower, going for sales volume, and accepting a few less than ideal gross profit outcomes sooner rather than later.

Now, in the case of our Platinum and Gold cars, these are being priced lower than the recommended amount because all our Bronze and Silver cars are priced too high and aren't selling fast enough.

The manager feels pressure to keep up sales volume, and is cheap-selling the best cars to sell them faster, and compensate for that lack of volume. Doing this can leave a lot of gross profit on the table – much more than if we had simply priced our Bronze and Silver cars a little lower at the start.

Let's take a look at one more alignment box. We see here that this manager is pricing within the ProfitTime recommendation 85 percent of the time. We think that this is an ideal acceptance rate.

We don’t want to be accepting 100% of ProfitTime recommendations, because there are some things our data can’t see about a particular vehicle that a human can see.

You want a capable manager on the other side of this software deciding if a recommendation makes sense for a vehicle, and making appropriate exceptions when needed.

This manager is doing exactly that — rejecting some of the recommended prices — and striking a balance between pricing below and above the recommended range. What you don’t see here is a clear bias towards volume or gross, as we did in the other managers.

With these insights, you can quickly identify improper use and proper use of the ProfitTime recommendation system, as well as fine-tune your manager’s pricing strategy across multiple rooftops for the optimum volume and gross profit.

We hope this has helped you better understand ProfitTime’s pricing recommendations, and how to use the data in the Pricing Alignment Box to your advantage. Thanks, and be sure to reach out to your vAuto performance manager with any questions.