How to Track Recon Time Per Vehicle (Without Chasing People)

Why total recon time hides the real problem

Most stores can tell you a car took nine days to hit the front line. Almost none can tell you it sat for three of those days waiting on an approval that took four minutes to give.

Total elapsed time is one number; the breakdown per stage is the diagnosis. Until you can see time-in-stage per vehicle, every conversation about recon speed is a guess — and usually ends with each department insisting the holdup is somewhere else.

What to timestamp

Record a timestamp every time a vehicle changes state, not just when it enters and leaves recon:

• Vehicle acquired (trade logged in the DMS or purchased at auction)
• Inspection completed
• Work approved (this gap is the most common silent killer)
• Parts received, if the job waited on parts
• Mechanical work completed
• Body shop or sublet returned
• Detail completed
• Photos taken and vehicle listed
• Physically on the front line

With those points captured, time-in-stage falls out automatically, and weekly averages by stage show you the bottleneck without an argument.

Three ways to capture it

1. Whiteboard or spreadsheet. Free, fast to start, and fine for proving the idea — but it depends on someone updating it the moment work moves, which is precisely what nobody has time for during a busy week.
2. Your DMS repair order timestamps. ROs already carry open/close times for mechanical work. The gaps: approvals, detail, photos, and the handoffs between departments mostly happen outside the RO.
3. Recon workflow software. Each handoff is a system event, so stage timestamps happen as a side effect of people doing the work instead of as extra admin. That is the approach Deal to Delivery takes — every trade auto-creates a workflow, and each completed step triggers and timestamps the next.

Make the number mean something

Once stage times are visible, pick one bottleneck a month and put an owner and a target on it. Cutting an average approval gap from two days to four hours is a real, repeatable win — and at $30–$50 per vehicle per day, faster recon shows up directly in front-end gross.