Most dealership AP teams aren’t asking for transformation. They’re asking for a workday that feels manageable. They already know change is hard because they’re dealing with the pressure every day. Work keeps piling up, deadlines don’t ease up, and approvals still get stuck in inboxes, side conversations, and handoffs that make sense to one person but create extra cleanup for someone else.
That’s what made our recent webinar, Shifting Gears: Leading Change in Dealership Financial Operations, feel so timely. Hosted by Tara Pawlak of onPhase and featuring Ashley Felts, Senior Business Analyst at onPhase and former dealership AP leader; Daniel Bilson, Chief Financial Officer at Roberts Truck Center; and Billy Szala, Operations Analyst for the TNTX Group, which includes Lone Star Truck Group and TAG Truck Center, the session stayed focused on the real operational strain dealership finance teams are dealing with right now. What made the discussion worth paying attention to was how practical it felt. Instead of staying high level, the panel focused on where dealership finance operations start to strain, what holds change back, and what actually improves once teams commit to a better process.
The timing made that conversation feel even more relevant. NADA reports that dealerships handled more than 270 million repair orders in 2024, with service and parts sales topping $156 billion. On the risk side, AFP found that 79% of organizations experienced attempted or actual payments fraud activity in 2024, and 63% said business email compromise was the leading avenue. For dealership AP leaders, that mix of volume and vulnerability raises the stakes around visibility, approvals, and control.
One of the clearest themes from the panel was that many AP problems start long before payment. They begin when no one can clearly see where work stands.
Daniel described a pre-automation process built around paper, email, and too many unknowns. Invoices moved from AP to managers, then back again, with little real oversight into what had been approved, what was still sitting out there, or what might show up too late to pay on time. As he put it, “No oversight on what’s out there.” Billy offered a version of the same issue from the operations side. An invoice gets sent to one person instead of a shared process, that person goes on vacation, and suddenly the bill sits while the vendor calls asking what happened. Both stories pointed to the same root problem: the process technically existed, but visibility broke down before the work did.
Ashley pushed that point a step further by explaining that automation doesn’t just move invoices faster. It exposes work that was never really being measured in the first place. Roles and responsibilities may look fine when you view them one department at a time, but once you follow the full invoice cycle, the weak spots become a lot harder to ignore.
Her example of shipping and receiving acting like the quarterback of the process was especially useful. If receiving isn’t aligned with the PO, the rest of the play breaks down, and what looked like a small disconnect upstream turns into extra work and confusion later. In a manual process, that kind of breakdown can stay buried for a long time. Once timestamps, data, and workflow visibility enter the picture, it becomes much easier to see where the process is actually slowing down.
The first audience poll reinforced that point almost perfectly. Attendees split evenly between manual work and inefficiencies and approval delays and bottlenecks, with 43% selecting each. That result felt honest because the two issues feed one another. More manual work creates more handoffs, more handoffs create more delays, and more delays create more follow-up for AP. Billy captured that dynamic with one of the strongest lines from the session: “If you can measure it, you can improve it.”
The visibility problem isn't just operational, it's a fraud risk. Daniel flagged this directly: without a shared process, there's no way to know if an invoice is being paid twice, or if something that didn't belong ever made it into the queue. AFP found that 79% of organizations experienced attempted or actual payment fraud in 2024, with business email compromise leading the way. For dealership finance teams operating with personal inboxes and no shared workflow, that's not a background risk. It's a live one.
Another useful takeaway from the panel was that most teams aren’t afraid of automation because they love paper. They’re worried about what disruption might do to a day that already feels overloaded.
That showed up clearly in the second audience poll, where 63% of attendees said the biggest barrier to improving dealership operations was that the day-to-day workload is simply too busy. That answer lands because it reflects how most dealership teams actually feel. When the workday is already full, even a worthwhile improvement can sound like one more thing to manage. The hesitation has less to do with long-term value and more to do with how the team gets from here to there without dropping the ball in the middle.
What a real rollout actually looks like starts there. Knowing the pain and deciding to act are two different things, and Billy’s advice closed that gap in a way that stuck: begin with the end in mind. Know the outcome you’re working toward, then work backward from there. Start with one location. Make it one that’s open to change and has a manageable data set. Fix what breaks before you expand. His line, “Take one piece of it, take one step of it, try it,” worked because it made change sound doable instead of disruptive, and because it gave teams a way to see the process working before they were asked to trust it at scale.
Daniel echoed that from the CFO seat. He talked about looking at fit first, narrowing the field, getting team input early, and keeping people involved throughout training and rollout. He didn’t pretend everyone would be excited right away, but he was clear that leadership still has to move the business forward. As he put it, “You just have to embrace it, force it, to see the outcome at the end.”
Ashley added one of the sharpest observations of the session when she said, “There are things happening on the front line that you truly do not know happen.” That’s exactly why buy-in matters more than a feature list. Leadership needs the frontline view if they want to understand what’s actually slowing the process down, and frontline teams need clarity on the goal if they’re going to trust where the process is headed. Without that connection, change stalls long before budget becomes the real issue.
Dealership finance teams don't experience cost pressure as a headline. They experience it as accumulation. That’s why ROI has to show up in the workflow itself, not just in a business case slide.
It looks like invoices sitting in email while an approver is out. It looks like freight, recon, parts, warranty, and facility costs arriving on different timelines with different documentation. By month-end, close can turn into a scavenger hunt because the information exists, just not in one reliable place. Meanwhile, leadership wants a clearer picture of liabilities while AP is still chasing context.
This is where traditional ROI discussions start to miss the point.
A system doesn’t have to create a dramatic, headline-worthy transformation to deliver real return. Sometimes the return shows up in quieter, more practical ways. It shows up in fewer approval delays, earlier visibility into liabilities, less manual cleanup, better payment timing, and fewer last-minute surprises. On the surface, those may sound like operational improvements, but they carry real financial value.
One of the best parts of the conversation was how often the panelists came back to simple, grounded improvements instead of abstract ROI language.
Daniel shared that Roberts Truck Center had moved from a paper-only process to an internal system and then to onPhase, reducing a four-system workflow down to two. That cut duplicate entry and gave location staff more time to focus on what they actually needed to do at the dealership instead of constantly circling back to AP work. His point was easy to picture. When the process stops swallowing the day, people have more time to support the business instead of cleaning up after the workflow.
Billy’s version of that “aha” moment was even more memorable because it was so visual. When he was asked what improvement stood out, he joked, “How about just their desk? Not being covered. With paper!” It got a laugh, but it landed because everyone knew exactly what he meant. He walked through the drag created by printing, writing on paper, rescanning, storing documents, and then pulling them back up later, all while burning paper, toner, printer maintenance, and storage space. Those might not be the first benefits someone puts into a business case, but they’re the first ones people feel in their day-to-day work.
Ashley brought that same point home from the AP seat. Before automation, year-end meant boxes of paperwork, and statement reconciliations were the kind of task that kept getting pushed because the immediate work always won. A few months after go-live, she said she was finally able to get to statements consistently.
Then, around the six-month mark, the day started to feel different. There was more routine, less chaos, and enough breathing room to do actual accounting work, improve processes, and even take time off without worrying that the whole operation would stall behind her. Those aren’t flashy wins, but they’re powerful because they change what the job feels like.
Another theme that came through clearly in both the panel and your supporting notes was that language matters. Teams hear change differently depending on how leaders frame it.
The strongest version of that idea came through in how the panel talked about capacity. No one framed automation as replacing people. Instead, the conversation centered on creating time for better work, bringing more consistency to the process, and giving skilled employees room to focus on responsibilities that actually need them.
Daniel talked about reducing duplicate effort. Billy talked about making the work more manageable and more visible. Ashley talked about getting back to statement reconciliations, process improvement, and work-life balance. The point wasn’t to reduce contribution. It was to reallocate it more intelligently.
That’s also why the hidden wins in this discussion felt more persuasive than a hard savings argument. Cleaner reconciliations, fewer approval black holes, less paper, less chaos, more consistency across locations, and more confidence that the work is actually moving all add up to something important. They make people more likely to say they wish they’d started sooner, and in conversations like these, that kind of hindsight can be more powerful than a spreadsheet. Ashley’s advice captured the spirit of it well: “Just embrace it. Just embrace the change.”
She offered one more reframe worth holding onto: reassure people that ten years ago the operation wasn't where it is today. The reason to make a change now is to be somewhere different ten years from now. That's a longer view than most resistance is built to argue against.
What made this panel useful was how little time it spent talking about bells and whistles and how consistently it stayed focused on execution, which is where dealership teams actually live. The message wasn’t that change is easy, and it definitely wasn’t that teams should overhaul everything overnight. It was much more practical than that: start where the work gets stuck, listen closely to the people doing it, build around visibility, keep the goal clear, and give the process room to improve in stages.
For dealership AP leaders, that may be the most practical takeaway of all. Progress rarely begins with the perfect rollout plan. It starts when the business gets honest about where work is breaking down and decides the cost of waiting is finally higher than the discomfort of changing. For a closer look at how these dealership finance leaders approached change in practice, the full panel is worth watching. The on-demand recording of Shifting Gears: Leading Change in Dealership Financial Operations digs further into what slowed teams down, what helped them move forward, and what became possible once the process was easier to manage.