With the new Vehicle Videos feature for WebManager, you can turn your vehicle photos into full-motion advertisements with custom narration, vibrant music and animated titles.

This exciting upgrade is almost an entire new program itself, and it’s included with the most basic WebManager plans. So today, we wanted to give you an overview of what it can do.

Edit as Much— or as Little— as You Want

We spent a lot of time thinking about how dealers would actually use a video option for their vehicle listings. Ultimately, we realized many dealership employees wouldn’t have the time to sit around and tweak their videos to perfection. So we designed a solution that would work great “out of the box,” without any modifications. All you have to do to get a slick, professional video made for your car is check the box that says “Enable Video.”

WebManager lets you personalize your videos if you want, and generate them automatically if you don't.

True to the spirit of our products, you can also take things much farther. You can type your own script for our realistic text-to-speech narration, or switch up its order by dragging paragraphs to new positions. You can add dealership logos, images from your computer and our diverse library of background music. You can even use different images and background music in the intro and outro. And best of all, you can save all your favorite settings to a template that can be used again and again.

Change Anything in an Instant

One of the big headaches about working with video has always been its resistance to change. Once you edit a video, you have to export it into one huge video file that takes forever to upload onto your site. If you catch a mistake– like a misspelled title or fuzzy picture– you have to go back, re-edit the video and replace it with another huge video file. The whole process can easily take hours, just for one clip.

Switch up the feel of your video by choosing from our diverse library of background tracks.

So we did things differently. Our movies aren’t locked up in big, bulky files. They’re actually made from layers of scripted animations that take much less time to load or change. If you notice a misspelled word after a video has been created, you can make an instant correction from your WebManager dashboard. Your little mistakes become much more manageable. Plus, your viewers don’t have to wait for your videos to start playing. It’s a win-win.

Lights, Camera, Action!

Want to start adding videos to your website right away? Log into your WebManager account now, and use this handy Vehicle Video FAQ page as a reference. We’re planning to add more customizable features in the future, so watch this space for updates.

WebManager’s Staging section is designed as a place to prepare your vehicles before you move them to the Live section. If you have a WebManager prepaid plan, you won’t be able to make very many changes to your vehicles once you push them to Live. Therefore, we recommend doing the majority of your work in the Staging section.

To access Staging from anywhere in WebManager, hover over Inventory, then click Staging.

How to access the WebManager Staging screen

You will now see a list of all the cars you have in Staging. Each vehicle has a shield associated with it. The green shield means that car is ready to go to Live; the red shield means WebManager has some issues with that vehicle. If you hover over Errors, WebManager will tell you what the problem with that vehicle is. To clean up a vehicle, click on that vehicle’s year, make, and model.

Once in Staging, enter the Vehicle Details screen to make sure your information is correct.

Once inside the Vehicle Details page, you can edit your vehicle’s details. If you click the Decode button, WebManager will decode your VIN again. If you are using Internet Explorer, WebManager will show you most of the issues it has on your vehicle by noting them in red text. Once you’ve finished cleaning up the vehicle details, click Save & Exit. Please make note that there are many other steps that can be taken to process your vehicles before you send them to Live. For example, you can edit pricing information, description, features and warranty information.

When the shield to the right of your listing turns green, it's ready to upload.

After clicking Save & Exit, you will be taken back to the Staging screen. If you made all the changes that you need to make, the shield to the right of your vehicle will now be green. If it is still red, hover over Errors again to see what WebManager is taking issue with. Click the checkbox to the left of any vehicle(s) you would like to send to the Live section, then click Activate. You can also click the checkbox at the top of the list to check all of the vehicles on the page.

Send us your forms by conventional mail, and we can program them into DeskManager.

To date, we’ve added over 9,000 forms to DeskManager’s huge forms library. But if we don’t have the one you’re looking for, we’ll be happy to add it.

If you need a form programmed into the system, you will need to send us two originals in the mail (for the standard forms) or email us the original PDF file that you would like programmed. We cannot create forms based on scanned, photocopied, or faxed versions of ANY form. If you do send us your forms, please include a note telling us you need them programmed into DeskManager. Please include your company name, address, email address and phone number in the note.

Our address is below:

AutoManager Forms Department

12340 Santa Monica Blvd. Suite 203

Los Angeles, CA 90025

Forms are processed in the order that they are received. Generally, it takes between two and four weeks for us to create a form once we have it in hand. However, this can change depending on the volume of forms we receive. When we have finished creating your form, one of our technicians will call you and tell you how get it into into DeskManager.

There may be a charge for the programming of custom forms. If there is a charge for a form, your account representative will contact you with more information.

A large part of earning the trust of your customers is demonstrating that you care about getting them the right car. But with lots of things to keep track of, it’s impossible to remember every vehicle request yourself. That is, unless your dealer management system does it for you.

DeskManager lets you make a list of vehicles your prospects express interest in, and will automatically remind you when a close match gets imported into DeskManager for the first time. If you’d rather not wait for the right vehicle, you can print out this customer request list and take it with you to your next wholesale auction.

This feature is called “Inquiries,” and you can find it at the bottom right of any Prospect window. So let’s try it out.

Create a new prospect, go to the Inquiries section and hit “Add.” In the next window, fill out the fields to match a blue Ford F-150 with 50,000 miles maximum.

Now go to your Inventory screen and manually create a new vehicle: A blue Ford F-150 with 30,000 miles on it. Immediately, you’ll receive a pop-up informing you that one or more of your prospects is interested in that type of vehicle. Here’s what it looks like:

Click on the prospect you want to check out, and you’re whisked away to the Contacts screen, where you can see how to reach out to him or her.

For more tips on how to use DeskManager and WebManager more effectively, subscribe to our blog and newsletter.

As an auto dealer, you might never get to say “Get off my plane” to a real terrorist. But you can join the fight against international crime and terrorism just by using the “OFAC” button in DeskManager.

If your customer's name matches a name on OFAC's list, you're legally required to take some additional steps to establish the customer's identity.

“OFAC” stands for the Office of Foreign Assets Control, a branch of the United States Treasury Department that tries to deny resources to enemies of the state. OFAC maintains a frequently updated blacklist — called the Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) list — of people U.S. citizens and residents are prohibited from doing business with.

Now you could just search the Treasury Department’s website each time you start a deal, but we wanted to make things easier for you. So we included an OFAC button next to the customer name fields on each deal or lease screen that scans the government’s list for name matches. If it finds one, you’ll get a big “WARNING” screen that tells you what to do next. If you don’t get one, you can proceed normally with the sale.

To run a complete search, make sure you enter the customer’s full name and employer name before you hit the OFAC button.

OFAC checks are free for all DeskManager users, and it’s important to start training your employees to run them on every customer. This policy can reduce your chances of being accused of discrimination down the road.

For more information about DeskManager features and services, visit our website.

A couple weeks ago, we launched another big feature that makes accounting even simpler for DeskManager clients. In DeskManager 11.90.3, you can now send every financial record your accountant needs from each lease directly to QuickBooks, where the information will become reflected in your chart of accounts.

What does this mean for you, the dealer?

Our QuickBooks interface can take DeskManager lease data and map it to the correct accounts in QuickBooks.

If you have the Lease Here Pay Here module, it’s a massive time-saver, and essential to maintaining accurate accounting records. If your accountant pestered you to dig for this information manually, you’d really have to have an accounting degree of your own to know what to look for. Even if you did create the perfect report, it would take your accountant an enormously long time to parse this information into a format QuickBooks can work with. And yes, it’s a safe bet you’d be billed for every one of those extra hours.

It’s a lot cheaper and more reliable to let computers do most of the work. Here are some of the precision features you’ll find in our QuickBooks Direct Interface for leasing:

Separate Your Lease and Deal Accounts

By separating your lease accounting from your deal accounting, you can report far more expenses and reduce your tax liabilities. But our QuickBooks interface can go oven further, creating separate accounts for lease-specific taxes and fees.

Asset Depreciation

If you have Lease Here Pay Here, you’ll always know the true depreciation of each vehicle you lease. That’s important, because federal law allows you to expense the depreciation of your leased vehicle assets. When you expense the true depreciation of each vehicle, you’re reducing your reported income and the taxes you pay on that income.

First Periodical Payment/Odd Days Lease Charge

At the beginning of a lease, a customer must pay the first periodical payment along with the down payment if he or she wants to drive off the lot that day. If the customer wants the vehicle on some future date, the dealership must still calculate a lease charge for the time between the signing date and the drive-off date. DeskManager can record each of these scenarios, which allows you to account for the additional fees.

Leased Vehicle Asset Accounts

See all your vehicle assets, and account for the vehicles you have sitting on the lot versus vehicles that are being driven by lessees.

Custom Account Mapping

Our QuickBooks interface can easily be configured to map to the accounting structure you already use, so it’s not confined to our terms and labels.

Note: To send your auto leases to QuickBooks, you’ll need a recent copy of QuickBooks, the DeskManager Lease Here Pay Here module and the DeskManager QuickBooks Direct Interface.

Are you pricing your inventory competitively? With WebManager’s Price Comparison tool, you’ll always know the answer.

What It Means

Being able to see, at a glance, what your competitors are asking for a particular vehicle gives you a major competitive advantage. It means you can constantly adjust your prices to slightly undercut theirs, which is likely to bring you a lot more leads.

How to Use It

Click “Pricing” on any vehicle in your live inventory and scroll to the bottom for the green “Price Comparison” button. When you click on it, you’ll be taken to a page that shows you, graphically, where your internet price ranks against other local vehicles of the same year, make and model that are listed on eBay, AutoTrader and Cars.com. We even give you a price distribution chart that shows you how to adjust your price to be competitive, but still profitable.

WebManager's Price Comparison tool can show other internet listings in your area that are competing against each vehicle you post. Clicking on a vehicle will take you to the listing itself for more details.

We also provide a simple, easy-to-understand  graph that represent the highest, lowest and median internet price for each marketplace. If you click the green View button, you can actually go to these vehicle listings to see if there are additional factors affecting their price, such as mileage, extra features, vehicle wear, etc.

Plug In Your Own Info

If you haven’t assigned a price to your vehicle yet, you won’t be able to compare it to the competition on these graphs. So let’s go ahead and add an internet price by scrolling back up to Standard Pricing. Enter a number that you think is a fair price for the vehicle, and hit “Save Changes” at the bottom left.

When the page reloads, you’ll see your price plotted against the prices offered by your competitors. In the second graph, you’ll want to make sure the green diamond representing your price is somewhere in the middle of the cloud of other dots. If it’s way outside the cloud, your price is either incredibly low or too high to be competitive.

One of the great advantages of WebManager is its vehicle export tool, which allows you to send current vehicle listings to more than 85 popular online auto marketplaces. In today’s how-to, we’ll show you how to get your listings get updated four times per day, automatically, on sites like Cars.com, AutoTrader and eBay Motors.

From the WebManager dashboard, hover over Settings at the top, then Inventory, then click Exports.

At the top of this screen, you can choose which vehicle price you want to export, as well as a few options for your vehicle description. Below that, on the left hand side, you will see a list of all the sites WebManager exports to. Each site may look for something different, so to see what you need to do, clickthe name of the site you want to export to and read the instructions that pop up.

To enable an export, click the checkbox to the left of the site name. If the site wants you to input a Dealer ID, you can put that in the middle column. The right column will tell you when that site will export. (Please note that all time stamps are Pacific Standard Time). When you have finished, click the Save Changes button.

To select the vehicles you would like to export, hover over Inventory at the top, then hover over Live, then click Exports.

From the exports window, you will see all of your Live vehicles on the left. To the right of each vehicle, you will see a box for each export site you have set up. If the box is green, that means that the vehicle is selected to go to that export site. If the box is gray, that means that the vehicle is NOT selected to go to that export site. Clicking on a box will toggle between the vehicle exporting to that site and not exporting to that site on the next export cycle.

You can also view the export history for all of your vehicles by hovering over Inventory at the top, then clicking on Export History.

From the Export History page, you will see a list of all the vehicles that went out, when they went out, and which sites they were distributed to. These are organized by export site, but you can choose a different sorting method by clicking on the arrow to the right of date. You can also filter which site you want to see the export history for — under whichever date you’re looking at — by clicking on the arrow to the right of Site.

Whether they’re currently looking to buy a car or not, the fact is that your potential customer base spends much of its time on Facebook. Earlier this year, comScore reported that Facebook reached at least 73 percent of the entire U.S. internet population, and the average American internet user spends 1 out of every 8 minutes online on the popular social networking site–and that figure is rising rapidly.

But that’s not the only reason dealerships should embrace Facebook. In Shop.org’s 2011 Social Commerce Study, 49 percent of respondents said they like to keep track of product updates on a business’ Facebook fan page. So when you get new inventory that you want to unload quickly, Facebook is a great place to tell people about it. And the best way to do that is to have it updated right on your fan page.

If you’re a WebManager WebPlus user, you’re able to do just that. Our Facebook app adds an Inventory tab to your fan page, which contains the same inventory search system you have on your website.

How to Use This Feature to Its Potential

Let’s say you’ve just picked up an ’09 Dodge Charger in great condition from a fleet auction. After you’ve taken your pictures and uploaded it to your website, it will also go straight to your Facebook Inventory tab. To highlight it, you could post one of the vehicle photos in your status and tell people to click through to your fan page and look for it in under Inventory. Now you’ve got a message that’s reaching lots of customers and giving them a convenient place to seek more information.

For more information on how WebPlus can spark your marketing efforts, check out this flyer. For pricing information, see our WebManager Pricing page or talk to an account manager at (800) 300-2808.

Courtesy of Tech Support Kyle,  we’ve got our first video to share on the AutoManager blog.

Check it out below to see step-by-step instructions for connecting a common Okidata Microline printer to DeskManager so you can print vehicle deal forms with ease. Using the video as a guide, the whole process shouldn’t take more than a couple minutes.

If you still have trouble, contact our Tech Support team via Live Chat, or watch this therapeutic video of an Okidata printer exploding.