Growth in auto retail rarely follows a tidy plan. You buy the crosstown store, then the group two markets over, and before long your finance team's logging into three different Dealer Management Systems before the morning coffee cools. One location runs CDK. Another runs Dealertrack. The store you closed on last spring runs Reynolds and Reynolds, and nobody's migrated its chart of accounts because the integration team is still buried in the deal itself.
This isn't a rare edge case. It's what a growing dealer group looks like in 2026, and the trend's only picking up speed.
The numbers tell the story. Kerrigan Advisors reported a record 458 dealership buy/sell transactions in 2025, covering 688 franchises, with more than 3,500 franchises changing hands over the past five years. That works out to roughly a 15% turnover rate across the franchise base, nearly double the pace before the pandemic. The biggest operators are scaling fastest, too. Since 2021, the number of dealerships owned by the top 150 groups backed by outside capital has climbed 52%.
Every one of those deals brings a new store into a group, and that store arrives running whatever Dealer Management System (DMS) it had on closing day. A lot of this growth is regional, with buyers expanding inside markets where they already operate, so a group often ends up with clustered locations sitting on entirely different systems just a few miles apart.
Forcing every newly acquired store onto a single platform sounds clean on a whiteboard. In practice it's expensive, disruptive, and sometimes flatly off the table. Retraining staff costs real money and real hours, and certain OEM programs and franchise agreements steer locations toward specific systems. So the honest answer to "should every store use the same DMS" is usually no, and that's perfectly fine.
The better question is the one most groups skip. How do you run consistent accounts payable across locations that'll never share a single DMS?
Here's where the patchwork starts to bite. Each Dealer Management System carries its own vendor master, its own approval routing, and its own chart-of-accounts structure. Run CDK and Dealertrack together across two stores and you're maintaining two of everything, with a third set of rules waiting at the Reynolds and Reynolds store and a fourth on the heavy truck side if a rooftop runs Karmak Fusion.
This isn't only a dealership headache. Finance teams everywhere fight system sprawl, and APQC benchmarking puts finance shared services at a median of three separate back-office platforms, each one fragmenting data, inflating cost, and slowing reporting. Dealer groups just live that same problem one store and one DMS at a time.
The friction shows up in predictable, costly ways. Two stores code the same vendor differently, so a match that works cleanly in one store fails in the other. The same supplier gets set up twice under slightly different names, which opens the door to duplicate payments nobody catches until the statement lands. And once a discrepancy surfaces, untangling it eats hours. APQC benchmarking shows the slowest finance teams take roughly twice as long as the fastest to resolve a single invoice error. That gap compounds fast when every store codes things its own way.
Now picture a controller trying to answer a basic question at the group level. What do we owe NAPA across every store this month? Who approved the $40,000 parts invoice at the store we bought in March? What's our total open payables exposure heading into close? In a multiple DMS dealer group, those answers live in separate systems that were never built to talk to each other.
So the work falls to people. Someone exports a report from each DMS, drops the numbers into a spreadsheet, and stitches together a group view by hand. The picture's already stale by the time it's finished. Month-end becomes a reconciliation marathon, and group-wide AP reporting turns into a multi-day project instead of a single click.
The cost is more than time. Approvals stall while an invoice waits for the right signer in the right system, and the early-payment discount quietly slips away. Vendors who supply three of your stores field three different payment timelines and three different points of contact, and they notice. That missing visibility is a control problem, and control problems get expensive fast.
When every store runs its own approval rules and its own vendor list, a fraudster doesn't need to beat your strongest process. They only need to find your weakest one. A patchwork of Dealer Management Systems hands them exactly that kind of soft spot.
The data isn't subtle. The Association for Financial Professionals found that 76% of organizations faced attempted or actual payments fraud in 2025, and 74% were targeted by business email compromise. That's the scam where someone poses as a known vendor or a senior exec and asks finance to send a payment or quietly update banking details. It works because it slides into a normal-looking workflow and rarely trips an alarm. Staying ahead of these schemes comes down to consistent controls, which is exactly what a multi-DMS setup tends to lack.
The dollars behind it are real. The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center logged $3.04 billion in reported business email compromise losses in 2025, up from $2.77 billion the year before. A dealer group with five locations and five separate sets of payment controls has five front doors to defend, and the people running these scams know how to find the one left unlocked.
Paper checks make the picture worse, and plenty of locations still cut them. Checks stayed the payment method most often hit by fraud in 2025, with 58% of organizations reporting an incident. The scale is sobering. The Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network tracked more than $688 million in suspicious activity tied to mail-theft check fraud across roughly 15,400 reports in a single six-month stretch, with an average reported amount near $44,000. Spread that kind of exposure across locations printing checks on different systems with different controls, and the math gets uncomfortable in a hurry.
Fraud is the loudest version of this risk, but it isn't the only one. When AP controls vary by location, your audit trail varies right along with them, and that's a conversation with your CFO or external auditor you'd rather not have.
Inconsistent controls and group-level blind spots are the symptoms. The cause is structural. Accounts payable is trapped inside each individual DMS, when it should be sitting above all of them.
So, can one AP system work with multiple DMS platforms at once? Yes, and that's the entire idea.
Picture a single accounts payable layer that sits on top of CDK, Dealertrack, Reynolds and Reynolds, and Karmak Fusion all at the same time. Invoices flow into one place regardless of which store they belong to. AI-powered capture reads each invoice and pulls the line-level detail automatically, so a parts invoice from the Dealertrack store and one from the CDK store land in the same queue, in the same format, ready to move.
From there, every invoice runs through consistent approval workflows. The group sets the rules once, covering dollar thresholds, who signs off on what, and which store and department each cost belongs to. A $40,000 invoice routes the same way whether it came from the store you've owned for twenty years or the one you closed on last quarter. Payments then go out through a single controlled rail instead of five separate check runs carrying five separate risk profiles.
Underneath all of that, the data still posts back to each store’s Dealer Management System. The CDK store stays on CDK. The Karmak store stays on Karmak. Nobody rips anything out. The AP layer simply standardizes capture, approval, and payment across the group while each DMS keeps doing the job it already does well.
That's what dealer group AP centralization actually looks like in practice, and it answers the acquisition question cleanly. When you bring on a new store, you don't migrate its DMS to fold it into the group's standard. You connect that store to the layer already sitting on top, and it inherits your approval rules and your controls on day one. This happens without a DMS migration, a retraining sprint, or a delayed close.
The payoff is the visibility you've been assembling by hand all along. Centralized AP across a multi-location dealership gives you one vendor master view, one approval trail, and group-wide AP reporting that reflects today instead of last Tuesday. When AP visibility becomes this reliable, leadership stops treating finance data as a guess and starts using it to make calls. Multi-location AP visibility turns from a spreadsheet exercise into something you can simply pull up and read.
Dealer groups will keep growing through acquisition, and those acquisitions will keep arriving on different Dealer Management Systems. Standardizing every store onto one platform was never realistic, and chasing it burns time and goodwill you can't spare.
The smarter move is to standardize the layer that actually drives risk and visibility, which is accounts payable. Let CDK be CDK and Dealertrack be Dealertrack. Put one consistent AP process on top of both, plus every other system in the group, and the noise settles down on its own.
That's the exact problem onPhase was built to solve, one AP layer above whatever each store runs, with consistent capture, approval, and payments across the entire group. That future never hinged on every store running the same DMS. It hinges on the layer you put above them. If you're mapping out where your back office heads next, our take on the 2026 Dealership Technology Trends That Drive Efficiency and Control digs into how clean capture, policy-led approvals, and end-to-end visibility are already reshaping dealership finance.