A Dealership Settings Review Checklist for Admins

The used-car manager walks into the office on a Tuesday and asks why a former associate can still open the posting dashboard from home. Nobody has a clean answer. The person who set up the account left six weeks ago. Roles were assigned in a hurry during a Saturday auction dump. Billing is still sitting on a plan that no longer matches how many people actually post. The lot is moving units. The admin configuration is not.

A dealership settings review checklist for admins is not a software tour. It is a recurring audit of who can sign in, what each login is allowed to do, how inventory is supposed to flow, and whether the store is paying for the team structure it actually runs. Skip it for a quarter and you get shared passwords, ghost users, stalled queues, and a billing page that no longer matches the floor.

This article is for the client admin — the primary dealership login — and for the general manager who owns that seat even if someone else clicks around the dashboard. It walks through access, roles, queue rules, inventory hygiene, import sources, and plan fit, then shows how to put the same review on a monthly calendar.

Why a Dealership Settings Review Checklist for Admins Belongs on the Calendar

Configuration drift is quieter than a failed post and more expensive over a month of floor-plan interest. People change jobs. Associates get promoted. A weekend closer borrows a laptop. A new manager starts assigning units without knowing who already claimed them. None of that shows up as a red banner. It shows up as messy ownership.

What "settings" means in this review

PostToMarket has a Settings area on the dashboard, alongside Inventory, Import, Queue, Team, Leads, Analytics, and Billing. This checklist treats "settings" as the whole operating configuration of the store, not a hunt for hidden toggles. You are confirming:

• Who has a login and whether that person still works here.
• Whether each login's role matches the job they actually do.
• How vehicles move from shared inventory into personal and associate queues.
• Whether sold and failed units are being cleaned up.
• Whether the current plan matches the number of people who post.

Do not invent extra screens. If you cannot confirm a rule from Team, Queue, Inventory, Import, Billing, or Settings, write it down as a store SOP instead of assuming the product will enforce it.

Who should run it, and how often

The admin owns the review. A manager can help pull the Team list and walk the queue, but billing and offboarding sit with the primary account. Run a full pass once a month, and run a short pass any time someone is hired, promoted, or terminated.

A reasonable calendar:

Confirming Team Logins, Roles, and Offboarding

Start with people. Almost every messy posting week traces back to a login that should not exist or a role that does not match the job.

Pull the live team list and mark every name

Open Team and read it against the current sales board, not against your memory. For each login, write one of four notes: active and correctly role-mapped, active but wrong role, departed and must be removed, or unknown. Unknown is not a holding pattern. Unknown is a task for today.

Then confirm role mapping against the four roles the product actually uses:

• Admin: one primary dealership login. Full dashboard, including team and settings. There is no separate "owner" role.
• Manager: team lead. Team CRUD, settings, inventory, import, and assignment to associate queues. The Dealership plan allows two managers.
• Sales rep: full salesperson. Inventory, personal queue, mark sold, leads. Reps self-queue from shared inventory.
• Sales associate: posting-focused. Queue only. Managers assign; associates do not add units from inventory themselves.

If you need a deeper role map before you touch anything, use the admin, manager, sales rep, and associate roles explained guide, then come back and mark the live list.

Kill shared logins on sight

Five people using one email is not a team. It is a single account with a rotating behavioral fingerprint, and it makes offboarding impossible. Each person who posts should sign in with their own email. The Chrome extension signs in with email; there are no API keys to share, which is a feature only if each person has their own seat.

Offboarding on the day someone leaves:

1. Remove or disable their login so they cannot open Inventory, Queue, or the extension.
2. Open the team queue view and release every claim still sitting in their name.
3. Reassign associate work to a manager or another associate; do not leave units parked in a departed queue.
4. Confirm nobody else was using that email as a shortcut.

The offboarding a departing rep checklist is the companion SOP for that same-day handoff.

Starter vs. Dealership is a settings question

Starter is one login. If more than one person is posting, you are either sharing a seat or you are on the wrong plan. Dealership is up to 13 team logins. Count the people who actually post, including the weekend closer and the associate who only works Thursday through Saturday. If the count exceeds what you paid for, the settings review has already found its first fix.

Confirming Queue Rules, Inventory Hygiene, and Import Sources

Once the people are clean, review how work moves. Admins who only look at Team and Billing miss the operational settings that actually stall units.

Queue ownership rules you should be able to say out loud

Write four sentences and see if the floor agrees with them:

• Managers assign inventory to associate queues. Associates do not self-queue from inventory.
• Sales reps self-queue from shared inventory and work a personal posting queue.
• Anyone can see claims in the team queue view, and a manager can release a stuck claim.
• A unit that sold on the floor is marked sold and archived the same day, from inventory or from the queue.

If those four sentences produce an argument, the store does not have settings. It has habits. Habits break on Saturdays.

For assignment mechanics, pair this review with assigning vehicles to associate queues. For stuck claims, use the team queue view to release and reassign.

Inventory statuses as an admin health check

Every vehicle should be in one of five statuses: draft, posting, posted, sold, or failed. During the settings review, you are not decoding every VIN. You are looking for piles that mean the process is broken:

• Drafts that never move. Import happened. Nobody queued.
• Failed units with no owner. Posting did not complete, and the record is sitting as a silent exception.
• Sold units still sitting in a rep queue. The floor already took the deal; Marketplace still thinks the car is for sale.
• Posted units with no recent photo or copy review. Not a status bug, but a quality drift signal.

Unlimited vehicles in inventory on every plan is useful only if the statuses stay honest. A bloated inventory full of sold and failed rows is not a feature. It is a settings problem: nobody owns cleanup.

Import source of truth

Confirm where new units actually enter the system this month:

• Bulk CSV or Excel from the DMS export, with import history and the row-level error log reviewed after each upload.
• Capture from auction and wholesale sites for units that never hit the weekly file.
• Manual exceptions, which should be rare and named as exceptions.

If three people each "own" the weekly file, nobody owns it. Name one admin or manager as the importer of record. After every upload, that person opens import history, fixes or skips error rows, and tells the floor which drafts are ready to queue.

The Billing Block of a Dealership Settings Review Checklist for Admins

The last block of a dealership settings review checklist for admins is commercial, not cosmetic. Wrong plan, unused logins, and no support path all look like "the tool is confusing" when they are actually admin gaps.

Walk Billing with the live headcount in hand

Open Billing with the Team list next to it. Ask:

• Are we on Starter ($59/month, one login) or Dealership ($299/month, up to 13 logins, two managers)?
• How many logins are provisioned vs. how many people posted last week?
• Is anyone sharing a seat because we never upgraded?
• Do we still need every login, or are we paying for people who left?

Do not hunt for annual pricing. There isn't any in this product. Checkout is Stripe. Cancellation is available anytime. If the 10-day trial is still running, use this same checklist as the evaluation scorecard instead of waiting until day ten to notice the role map is wrong.

Write down the support path before you need it

Support is info@posttomarket.com. During the settings review, confirm that more than one manager knows that address, and that a failed post is documented with VIN, timestamp, status, and which login was signed into the extension. A clean support email is an admin setting in the operational sense: it is a rule the store follows.

How PostToMarket Automates This

Stale admin configuration is a people-and-ownership problem, not a missing button. PostToMarket gives the admin a single place to see inventory, team, queues, import history, analytics, billing, and settings so the review is a walk through live records instead of a scavenger hunt across spreadsheets.

• Roles that match the floor. Admin, manager, sales rep, and sales associate are enforced in the product. Associates stay on assigned queues. Reps self-queue. Managers assign and can manage team and settings.
• Per-rep queues and a team queue view. You can see who claimed what and release a claim when someone is out or has left.
• Inventory statuses (draft, posting, posted, sold, failed) plus mark-as-sold and archive from inventory or the queue.
• Bulk CSV and Excel import with import history and a row-level error log, so the importer of record can prove what entered the system.
• Team analytics by rep and source, which tells you whether provisioned logins are actually posting.
• Billing on Starter or Dealership, with a 10-day trial and Stripe checkout, so plan fit is visible next to headcount.

The review still needs a human admin. The dashboard makes the evidence obvious.

Put This Admin Checklist on the Calendar Before the Next Auction Week

A dealership that posts well and administers poorly still leaks access, stalls queues, and pays for seats nobody uses. Run the dealership settings review checklist for admins this month, fix the ghost logins, and write the four queue rules on one page.

PostToMarket keeps unlimited vehicles in inventory on every plan, with team logins, queues, and statuses built for a real used-car desk. Starter is $59 per month when one person runs the lot. Dealership is $299 per month when you need up to 13 logins and two managers.

Start your 10-day free trial through secure Stripe checkout. Use the trial week to complete this admin review on live data, not on a demo story. Cancel anytime if the floor structure is not a fit.