Hello and welcome to another video in our series “Winning with ProfitTime”

Now that you’ve completed your personalized training, you can use these videos to refresh your knowledge, dive deeper into a topic or teach others the basics of ProfitTime.

Getting your recondition costs right on your appraisal page is crucial to maintaining accurate ProfitTime scores, and owning cars for the right amount of money.

Luckily ProfitTime comes with an easy-to-use tool that calculates your total recon costs using what we call “recon line items.” Creating and selecting these recon line items for each appraisal will help you and your team measure reconditioning costs quickly, easily, and accurately.

A common mistake dealers make is placing a static, universal number in their recondition costs for every vehicle. In this case, $1,800.

This might seem like a time-saver that covers basic detailing costs when a car comes through the shop, but it doesn’t take into account a specific vehicle’s needs, or vehicles that may need thousands of dollars of work to be front-line ready.

For example, if you put in a static reconditioning cost of $1,800 for a vehicle you end up paying say, $3,300 — that difference of $1,500 will greatly impact the ProfitTime score later, and lead to inaccurate pricing.

So, let’s look at how ProfitTime helps us easily get this number right with our recon line items.

Click the clipboard on the right hand side of your appraisal screen. This will bring up a list of reconditioning items you can select for each vehicle. The system will then automatically add up your total cost, and apply it to the appraisal amount.

Simply scroll through the list and check anything the vehicle needs. You can also create a “default” setting where certain recon list items are automatically checked for every vehicle, so you don’t have to click in and select repairs your dealership likes to get done with every acquisition.
If you have a vehicle that needs a typical repair from your list, but is going to cost more than the typical amount — say, a really bad rock chip — you can go in and edit the dollar amount just for that vehicle.

Once you’ve got everything covered in the list, hit save. You’ll see the new cost reflected in the reconditioning box.

This feature also lets you keep good records — no more jotting down notes. Simply save each vehicle’s appraisal page, and the recon items you checked will be recorded in the system.

But to get a comprehensive recon item list, each dealer must manually create it in their settings.

Click the gear icon, then click General Settings.

Click Recondition items on the left hand part of the screen.

Here you can add your recon items, remove items, change their values, and choose to have them checked by default. Be sure to hit save before you exit.

Thanks for taking a moment with us to look at the importance of reconditioning costs, and how recon line items work in ProfitTime. As always, please reach out to your vAuto performance manager with any questions.