For Buy Here, Pay Here dealers, Lease Here, Pay Here operators, and other vehicle finance businesses, a GPS tracking program can be easy to reduce to a line-item expense. Leadership sees the cost per device, multiplies it across the portfolio, and begins comparing vendors on price.
That approach overlooks the larger financial question: How much capital is the business trying to protect?
When a dealership finances a vehicle, a substantial portion of its own money goes out on the street. The customer’s down payment may cover only a small fraction of the acquisition, transportation, repair, and reconditioning costs associated with the asset. If the account becomes delinquent and the vehicle cannot be located, the loss extends well beyond a missed payment.
A GPS program should therefore be evaluated as part of the organization’s asset-protection and risk-management strategy. The most persuasive case to a CEO or CFO is not built around the devices. It is built around recoveries, avoided losses, productivity, and overall portfolio visibility.
Eric Sundberg, PassTime’s Vice President of the Business Development Center, has worked with automotive dealers and finance companies for nearly two decades. His central point is that GPS should be judged by how effectively it protects the capital you have already invested in your portfolio.
For many operators, the real need for GPS begins as soon as they enter the Buy Here, Pay Here or Lease Here, Pay Here business.
In these business models, the dealership is doing much more than simply selling vehicles. It extends credit and accepts the financial risk that comes with that decision. The business purchases and prepares vehicles, collects down payments, and depends on future customer payments to recover the rest of its investment.
That makes asset protection an operational requirement, not just an optional add-on.
Even so, many GPS decisions are reactive. A vehicle disappears. A customer stops communicating. A recovery takes longer than expected. Or a low-cost device fails when your collections and recovery teams need a reliable location.
These incidents always create a sense of urgency, but the urgency can fade quickly. Once the immediate problem passes, attention shifts to inventory, staffing, compliance, or another pressing issue. The decision about implementing a reliable GPS system is delayed until the next loss brings it back into focus.
A stronger approach would be to evaluate GPS before a major incident occurs. Once a dealership begins placing its own capital on the street, it should also establish a dependable way to protect and monitor its investments.
GPS programs are often pushed back because they compete with initiatives that appear more immediate or more directly tied to revenue. Inventory, marketing, hiring, facilities, and compliance all seem more urgent.
The program can also be weakened by how it is presented.
When managers frame GPS as a request to purchase tracking devices, leadership naturally focuses on unit cost and total cost. The conversation becomes a comparison between the cost of one box and another instead of an evaluation of the actual risk.
That is especially problematic because GPS products can appear similar from the outside. Two devices may use comparable components and offer many similar, or even identical, features, but similar hardware does not guarantee similar performance.
Sundberg describes one of the most common assumptions in GPS purchasing as the belief that “a box is a box is a box.”
That view overlooks the programming, tuning, reporting, system intelligence, and technical support that influence how well a device performs in the field. The more important question is not whether two products look alike. It is whether the overall solution works reliably when the dealership needs to locate and recover an asset.
Executives are more likely to support the investment when the discussion connects the program to write-offs, recovery rates, employee productivity, and portfolio performance.
One of the biggest misconceptions about GPS tracking is that the product with the lowest purchase price will create the lowest total cost.
That conclusion only makes sense if every product performs at roughly the same level.
Suppose a dealership saves $50 per unit by selecting a low-cost device. Across 100 installations, the apparent savings would be $5,000. That may look meaningful during the purchasing process.
However, if those devices have a higher failure rate and prevent the dealership from recovering even one vehicle worth $10,000 or $15,000, that $5,000 in device savings disappears. If several vehicles cannot be located, the cheaper option can become substantially more expensive than a more reliable program.
As Sundberg puts it, “Good is not cheap, and cheap is not good. Invest wisely.”
The point is not that the most expensive option is automatically the best. It is that the device price should be weighed against other factors such as reliability, recovery performance, failure rates, and the potential cost of losing a particular asset.
A complete cost analysis should account for device reliability, location quality, recovery speed, reporting capabilities, technical support, and customer service. These factors are harder to place in a simple purchasing comparison, but they often determine the true financial outcome.
Leadership rarely needs a detailed explanation of every technical feature inside a GPS device. They need to understand how the program and the device support the financial and operational health of the business.
That means translating the technology into business outcomes.
An executive is much more likely to care about whether a vehicle can be located quickly than about the specific methods used to generate the location. They are also more likely to care about the program’s effect on employee time, recovery efficiency, and capital protection than about the individual components inside the device.
Managers often weaken their presentations by spending too much time on technical capabilities and not enough time explaining what those capabilities will allow the organization to accomplish.
An executive-level presentation should show how GPS gives the dealership better information when an account becomes difficult to manage. It should explain how the information provided can reduce delays, support faster decision-making, and help employees spend less time working from outdated addresses, unanswered phone calls, and incomplete customer records.
A good way to sum this up would be:
A reliable GPS program helps protect the capital invested in each financed vehicle by giving the dealership better information and more control when an account requires action.
The most immediate value of GPS tracking is its ability to answer the simple but critical question: Where is the vehicle now?
Without reliable location data, a collections or recovery team may be relying on information collected when the customer initially purchased the vehicle. By the time the account becomes delinquent, the customer may have moved, changed jobs, or taken the vehicle far outside the normal operating area of the dealership and its recovery teams.
Phone calls, references, and address searches may help, but they do not always provide current information. GPS tracking gives the team a precise location to start with.
That can make the recovery process much more focused. Instead of searching broadly, the dealership can monitor the vehicle, coordinate with a repossession company, and decide when it makes the most sense to act.
Timing is always important. The longer a vehicle remains unaccounted for, the more opportunity there is for it to be moved, concealed, damaged, or altered. Reliable location information helps reduce that uncertainty and gives the recovery team a better chance to make decisions based on current conditions.
Sundberg shared an example involving a rideshare operator in New York. A driver stopped communicating, and GPS information revealed that the driver had taken the vehicle to Canada without authorization.
Finding the vehicle was only the first step, however. The operator also had to locate a recovery team in Canada, which was outside its normal operating area, that could monitor and reach the vehicle while the repossession was being coordinated.
The team chose not to use the starter-interrupt feature right away. Doing so too early could have alerted the driver and created additional risk. Instead, the team continued monitoring the vehicle’s location, waited until the recovery team was ready, and activated starter interrupt when the time was right for the vehicle to be secured.
The vehicle was successfully recovered, helping the operator avoid what could have been a $40,000 loss.
This is just one example showing why a GPS tracking program should not be viewed as simply a dot on a map. Its real value comes from giving the dealership the information it needs to plan and act effectively.
GPS tracking itself does not always influence customer payment behavior in the way a dealership might expect. The customer may understand that the vehicle can be located, but that knowledge may not create an immediate reason to respond.
Payment reminders and starter interrupt can play a different role for your business.
A payment reminder creates a consistent signal that the account needs attention. It can encourage the customer to contact the dealership before the issue becomes difficult to manage.
Starter interrupt introduces a more direct consequence. When used according to dealership policies, state compliance laws, and other applicable requirements, it can prompt a customer to communicate because access to the vehicle affects work, childcare, appointments, and other daily responsibilities.
Sundberg’s broader point is that customers often have more obligations than available money. They make decisions about which bills receive attention first. When there is no immediate consequence for delaying a payment to your dealership, that payment may move lower on the customer’s list of priorities.
Technology can help create a clearer and more consistent process. It does not replace good customer service, but it can support earlier and clearer communication and reduce the amount of time accounts remain unresolved.
The value of GPS extends beyond a single recovery. It can also give managers a clearer view of the broader portfolio.
A financed vehicle can travel a long distance in a short period of time. Without location visibility, the dealership may not know that an asset has left the expected area until the account is already difficult to manage.
GPS provides an added layer of awareness. It improves the dealership’s ability to understand where financed assets are and whether the technology assigned to them is working properly.
Reporting is an important part of that process as well. Managers should be able to easily identify devices that are not reporting, vehicles showing unusual activity, and accounts that may require closer attention. That information supports earlier decisions and more consistent portfolio management.
This is also where technical knowledge matters. Features such as geofences, device-status reporting, and alerts are only useful when managers understand what the information means and incorporate it into their process.
GPS does not eliminate risk entirely. It gives the dealership greater visibility into that risk and more information with which to manage it.
Managers often go wrong by presenting GPS as simply a technical upgrade or a device-purchasing decision.
A presentation focused heavily on features may lose the attention of leadership. A presentation focused on price may unintentionally encourage leadership to select the least expensive option without considering how the program will actually perform.
A stronger approach is to explain what the organization needs the technology to accomplish.
That may include improving recovery coordination, reducing time spent searching for vehicles, encouraging earlier customer communication, and giving leadership a clearer view of the portfolio.
Reliability should be part of this conversation, but it should be explained in operational terms. Leadership needs to understand what happens when the technology works as expected and what challenges arise when it does not.
This makes the proposal more concrete. It also moves the discussion away from whether one device costs slightly more than another and toward whether the overall GPS tracking program supports the dealership’s goals.
The first step is to understand how much the dealership has invested in the average vehicle.
From there, managers can examine how GPS supports the organization’s ability to manage that investment. The discussion should include factors such as recovery efficiency, employee time, customer communication, technology reliability, and portfolio visibility.
This creates a more complete business case than a simple comparison of GPS device pricing.
A GPS tracking program should not be positioned as a collection of devices or another recurring bill. It should be presented as part of the infrastructure that helps a dealership manage assets, respond to problems, and make more informed decisions.
For dealers placing their own money on the street, the real question is not whether GPS adds another expense. It is whether the business has the information and tools needed to manage its investment effectively.
