An 11-store credit operation left the spreadsheet and became a platform
Ideal Veículos moved its 11 stores' financing control out of Excel and gained a platform that orchestrates the entire operation, from request to contract, with the lenders' intelligence built in and every proposal recorded, custom-built by Epicora and live for over a year.
- Client
- Ideal Veículos (network of 11 stores)
- Sector
- Vehicle dealership · Financing management (F&I)
- What we did
- End-to-end web financing management platform
- Platform
- Responsive web (React, NestJS, MongoDB)
The starting point
Ideal Veículos is a network of 11 stores in western Santa Catarina and Palmas/PR, selling cars, motorcycles, pickups, trucks and machinery. Behind every credit-backed sale there is a critical, invisible job: F&I, the process of finding, among dozens of lenders, who approves that customer for that vehicle and on the best terms. It is a process that sustains much of the dealership's revenue, and it lived entirely in Excel spreadsheets.
It was a mess that kept freezing, literally. The spreadsheet had too much data and froze; each person filled it in a different way; and the result was information gaps. No off-the-shelf software could handle this process the way Ideal needed, so an entire network's operation relied on fragile files. The cost showed up where it hurts most: uncertainty in commissions and in the amounts returned by lenders, and no memory of what had been tried, since only the final proposal was recorded.
- A spreadsheet that froze from being so full, filled in differently by each person, fragile and full of gaps.
- Uncertainty in commissions and in the amounts returned by lenders: hard to know how much the operation actually earned.
- Only the final proposal was recorded, with no history and no audit trail. And the rule of which lender to use lived in people's heads, lost to team turnover.
The turning point
With no off-the-shelf software up to the task, Ideal made an owner's decision: to build a custom system for its own operation, with Epicora. Instead of digitizing the spreadsheet, Epicora designed a platform that controls the entire financing operation, from the credit request to tracking each proposal through to the contract, carrying the intelligence that used to live only in the team's experience.
And it was not a system delivered over the wall. The work started with scope definition and design, and development only began after approval of a clickable prototype; from there, it was incremental deliveries until the complete solution went into use. It reached the shop floor: Epicora did on-site accompaniment, with frequent interviews with the team, deployed the platform side by side with the operation and ran training to raise day-to-day adoption.
The decision that unlocked it
Take the rule of which lender approves this customer for this vehicle out of people's heads and put it inside the system. Each lender got its rules registered, and the platform began to recommend the right lenders for each case: tacit knowledge became system intelligence.
What we delivered
End-to-end request and tracking
The financing starts with the customer and the vehicle (pulled straight from stock) and is routed to several lenders at once. Each lender becomes its own space within the case, with its attempts (amount, installments and terms) through to the final decision and the contract.
Lender intelligence
The rules for each of the 19 lenders are registered in the platform (which vehicles each finances, minimum year, auction, license requirement). With that, the system recommends the right lenders for each customer and vehicle, with goals and ranking per lender.
Every proposal recorded, with history and audit trail
Before, only the final proposal made it into the spreadsheet. Now every attempt is recorded, forming a complete, auditable history. That turned guesswork about commissions into a trackable number and opened up precise analysis of the operation.
Management, stock and follow-up
Management dashboards (financings, approvals, contracts and ranking), stock integrated with Altimus (over 3,000 vehicles synced) and a follow-up logic: approved but unfinished proposals become a recovery queue for the team to reopen the negotiation.
How we made it solid
Role-based access
Each profile (F&I operator, management, administration) sees and does only what belongs to it, with permissions enforced in the system. No more company-wide spreadsheet open to everyone, exposed to error and leaks.
Organized, traceable data
Every financing, every attempt at each lender and every contract is recorded and linked, the complete trail that did not exist when only the final proposal survived. That provides audit, operational memory and a basis for decisions.
Staging before production
Every change is validated in a staging environment before going to production. Live and stable for 13 months, sustaining the credit operation of all 11 stores every day.
The result
In 13 months live, more than 11 thousand financings and 51 thousand proposals went through an operation that used to live in a freezing spreadsheet. The key difference: every proposal, not just the final one, is now recorded, giving Ideal what it never had: history, audit trail and clarity on commissions. And the intelligence that decided which lender to engage, once locked in the experience of a few, became part of the system, resilient to the natural turnover of an F&I team.
For a network of 11 stores, this is the leap from trusting the spreadsheet to operating with control, with the credit operation, which is strategic for the dealership, finally organized, measured and truly live.
We moved from spreadsheets that could no longer cope to a system where we access everything strategically. The process was smooth, with the team always close, and the solution turned out even better than we imagined.
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Does your operation also run on a spreadsheet that can no longer cope?
It is the kind of problem Epicora turns into custom software that generates results, with control, traceability and a system that is truly live.