Glossary

Days to turn is the average number of days a vehicle spends in a dealer's stock between arrival and sale. It is the standard measure of how fast used vehicle inventory moves, and it drives holding cost, pricing decisions and the age policy on the forecourt.

A dealer trade is the swap or outright purchase of a vehicle between two dealerships, used to get a specific car for a specific customer when the selling dealer does not have it in stock. It solves a customer order in days rather than the months a factory build would take.

Declined work is the recommended repair or maintenance a customer refuses to authorise at the point of the write-up. It is the same money as recommended work, viewed from the other side of the conversation, and it stays on the vehicle until someone else does the job or the part fails.

A deductible is the fixed amount a policyholder absorbs on a covered loss before the insurer pays anything, subtracted from the settlement on each claim. It is set at underwriting, applies per claim rather than per year, and is the same mechanism UK policies call a policy excess.

A deepfake is synthetic media generated by artificial intelligence: an image, video, audio clip or document depicting something that never happened. In claims, it means evidence with no real-world original behind it, unlike a shallowfake, which is a real file someone edited.

Defect classification is the practice of sorting inspection findings into severity classes, conventionally critical, major and minor, so that what happens next is driven by the seriousness of the fault rather than by who happened to write it up.

A delivery inspection is the condition check the receiving party carries out when an asset or consignment arrives, before signing for it. Signing without a reservation is not a formality. In carriage law it is treated as evidence that the goods arrived in the state described.

A deposit dispute is a formal disagreement between a landlord or agent and a tenant over deductions from a protected tenancy deposit, resolved by the deposit protection scheme's free adjudication service or by a court. The adjudicator decides on written and photographic evidence alone, never by visiting the property.

Depreciation is the accounting method that spreads the cost of a vehicle, machine, or other fixed asset across the years it is expected to earn its keep, writing down its book value each period instead of charging the whole purchase price to the year it was bought. It is cost allocation, not valuation.

A desk adjuster is a claims adjuster who handles claims from an office or remotely, working from documents, photographs, video and phone calls rather than travelling to inspect the loss in person. The role is also called an inside adjuster or a telephone adjuster.

Desking is the process of structuring and pricing a vehicle deal at the sales desk: turning the chosen car, the trade, the cash down and the customer's credit profile into one or more payment options, and setting what the salesperson is authorised to offer. The manager who does it is the desk.

Device fingerprinting is the practice of combining observable properties of a device and browser, such as screen dimensions, installed fonts, time zone, language and rendering behaviour, into an identifier that recognises the same device again without storing anything on it. It recognises devices, not people.

A digital claims journey is the end-to-end path a claim takes from first notification to settlement when every step is designed to be completed through digital channels. It describes the whole sequence rather than a single portal or app, and it is usually judged by how few times the customer has to leave it.

Digital evidence is any information created, stored or transmitted in binary form that a claims team, investigator or court may rely on to establish a fact, from photographs and video to messages, machine logs and the metadata generated alongside them.

A digital fingerprint is a short value calculated from the exact contents of a file, almost always using the SHA-256 hash function, so that the same file always produces the same value and changing anything at all, even one pixel in one frame, produces a completely different value.

Digital inspection forms are inspection checklists completed on a phone or tablet instead of paper, with each item recorded as a structured answer and the photos, location, time and sign-off captured inside the same record. They enforce completeness at the point of inspection rather than checking it afterwards.

Digital marketing for automotive: the channels that bring dealerships buyers (search, video, email, social) and where to start.

Digital retailing is the set of tools and processes that let a dealership structure and progress a real deal online: price, part exchange allowance, finance quote, add on products, deposit and paperwork, with the same numbers carried through to the showroom.

Dilapidations are the breaches of a commercial tenant's lease obligations to repair, decorate, and reinstate a property, together with the money claim a landlord brings to put those breaches right. In England and Wales the end-of-lease remedy is damages, not an order to carry out the work.

Dispatch is the act of releasing a job to a named technician and committing them to travel to site, with the parts, permits and information the job needs. It is the point where a plan becomes a vehicle on the road, and the last moment at which a visit can still be avoided.

A workshop dispatcher is the person in a dealership service department who decides which technician gets which repair order, in what order, and when it is released to the ramp, matching each job to the skill level it needs and to the hours the workshop has left to sell. It is a shop floor role, not field dispatch.

Disposal is the final stage of the asset lifecycle, where an asset is permanently removed from the operating fleet by sale, part exchange, scrapping or write-off. A disposal is only complete when ownership, liability and any statutory record have all transferred away from the operator.

DMS stands for Dealer Management System: the core software a dealership runs sales, F&I, parts, service and accounting on. What it does, with examples.

A driver daily defect report is the written record a driver completes after the daily walkaround check on a goods vehicle or bus, stating any defects found or confirming there were none. It is assessed and signed off by the operator, and DVSA guidance expects it to be kept for at least 15 months.

A drone inspection is a remote visual or sensor-based inspection carried out from an uncrewed aircraft, used to reach height, water or access-restricted structures without putting a person there. It gathers data for assessment. It does not replace the assessment itself.

A drop off is a service appointment where the customer leaves the vehicle at the dealership and goes away, collecting it later, rather than waiting on site while the work is done. It is the opposite of a waiter appointment, and it is the booking type that gives a workshop room to plan its day.

A data subject request is a person exercising one of their GDPR rights over their own personal data, most often the right of access under Article 15, which is why it is usually shortened to DSAR, or data subject access request. The clock starts the moment it arrives.

A DVIR, the driver vehicle inspection report, is the written report a driver of a commercial motor vehicle in the United States completes at the end of each day's work, listing any defect that would affect safe operation or is likely to cause a breakdown. The carrier must repair or certify each listed defect before the vehicle is driven again.

An EICR, or Electrical Installation Condition Report, is the formal report a qualified electrician produces after inspecting and testing the fixed wiring of a property. Landlords in England must obtain one at least every five years and act on any dangerous findings within a set period.

Error level analysis (ELA) is a technique that re-saves a JPEG at a known quality and maps the difference, on the theory that edited regions compress differently from the rest. It is suggestive at best. Forensic practitioners warn it flags genuine images and misses altered ones at similar rates.

Electronic proof of delivery (ePOD) is a digital record, captured on a phone or handheld at the point of handover, that shows a consignment was delivered: the time, the location, who received it, their signature or name, and usually photographs of the goods where they were left. It replaces the signed paper delivery note.

Effective labour rate, shortened to ELR, is what a workshop actually earns per labour hour sold, calculated as total labour sales divided by total hours sold. It is a measured outcome rather than a price, and it sits below the posted door rate in almost every workshop that measures it.

An emergency lighting test checks that emergency luminaires and exit signs come on and stay on when the normal supply fails. Under BS 5266-1 the routine is a short monthly function test and an annual full-duration test, each recorded in the emergency lighting logbook.

An end of lease inspection is the formal condition assessment carried out when a leased vehicle is returned, grading bodywork, glass, tyres, interior, equipment and paperwork against the return standard written into the contract. It produces the report that end-of-contract charges are built from.

Video engagement rate is the percentage of an audience that engaged with a video, but at least three incompatible formulas share the name: interactions over impressions, interactions over followers, and average percentage of the video watched. The formula has to travel with the number.

An engineer report is the written assessment a qualified motor engineer produces after examining a damaged vehicle, setting out the damage found, the cost and method of repair, and whether repairing it makes sense against the vehicle's value. Most total loss decisions rest on it.

Equipment finance is the funding a business uses to acquire machinery, vehicles, technology or plant without paying the full cost upfront, structured so the equipment itself is the main security for the debt. It covers both lending against equipment and the leasing structures built around it.

An escalation path is the pre-agreed route a problem takes when the team holding it cannot resolve it within agreed limits. It names who it goes to next, what triggers the move, how fast the next tier must respond, and what information travels with it.

An electronic vehicle health check, shortened to eVHC, is a technician's inspection of a vehicle in the workshop recorded on a tablet or phone against a fixed checklist. Each item is graded red, amber or green, backed by photos or video, and the report goes to the customer digitally with a way to approve the work.

Evidence integrity is the set of technical and procedural controls that let an organisation prove exactly what digital material it received, when the receiving system recorded it, whether that material is still unchanged, and what the team did with the case afterwards.

An exaggerated claim is a genuine insurance claim whose value or extent has been deliberately inflated beyond the actual loss. The incident is real, the damage is real, and the dishonesty sits only in the size of what is being asked for.

EXIF data is the block of technical information a camera or smartphone writes into an image file at the moment of capture, covering the device model, exposure settings, an embedded timestamp and, where location services are on, GPS coordinates.

Express service is a dedicated fast lane in a dealership workshop where routine maintenance is completed while the customer waits, inside a promised time that is usually around an hour. It runs on its own bays, its own technicians and a fixed list of jobs.

Fair wear and tear is the deterioration a vehicle picks up through normal, careful use over the term of a lease, as opposed to damage caused by a specific event, neglect, or misuse. It is the line every end-of-contract charge is argued across.

First contact resolution (FCR) is the share of customer contacts resolved during the first interaction, with no transfer, no callback and no follow-up ticket inside a defined window. It is the headline quality metric in most support operations, and the one most often measured badly.

A field adjuster is a claims adjuster who travels to the loss location, inspects the damage in person, and writes the estimate from what they see and measure on site. The role is also called an outside adjuster, or a field appraiser in motor claims.

A field engineer is a technically qualified person who works at customer sites rather than from a fixed workshop, installing, commissioning, diagnosing, repairing and certifying equipment where it sits. The role pairs hands-on technical skill with decisions made alone, on site, usually under time pressure.

F&I stands for finance and insurance, the dealership department that arranges the customer's funding and sells the protection products that go with it. It takes the agreed deal from the sales desk, secures a lender approval, presents the options, and produces the signed contracts.

Final inspection is the last conformity check carried out on a product or a completed job before it is released to the customer, verifying against the full set of acceptance criteria that everything the specification requires has been done, verified and recorded.

A fire door inspection is a documented check that a fire door and its frame, seals, hinges, glazing and self-closing device are intact and will hold back fire and smoke as designed. In England, taller residential blocks must check communal fire doors quarterly and flat entrance doors annually under the Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022.

A fire extinguisher inspection is the routine visual check that an extinguisher is in its place, unobstructed, undamaged, with the pin and tamper seal intact and the pressure gauge in the green. It is done monthly by the premises' own staff and is separate from the annual service by a competent engineer.

First line support is the first tier of a support organisation: the team that takes every incoming contact, logs it, resolves the issues that have a known answer, and hands the rest to a specialist tier with the diagnosis already under way. It is defined by scope, not seniority.

A first party claim is a claim a policyholder makes against their own insurance policy for their own loss, settled by their own insurer under the contract between them. Collision, comprehensive, buildings, contents and health claims are all first party claims.

First-time fix rate is the share of service jobs resolved on the first visit, with no return trip for parts, information or a second technician. It is the headline productivity measure in field service, calculated as jobs fixed first time divided by total jobs.

First touch attribution gives 100 percent of the credit for a sale to the earliest recorded marketing touch in the customer's path, ignoring every touch that comes after it. It answers one question well, which channel started the conversation, and assigns all the credit by convention rather than by evidence.

First visit resolution is the share of service visits that need no return trip, meaning the customer's concern is resolved and all authorised work is completed before the vehicle leaves. It is the dealership service equivalent of first-time fix rate, measured per visit rather than per job.

Fixed operations is the North American name for the side of a dealership that services and repairs vehicles instead of selling them: service, parts, and the body shop. It is called fixed because those departments carry fixed overhead and produce steady gross whether or not new cars are moving.

Flat rate is a pay system in which a technician is paid the published book time for a job rather than the hours actually spent on it, so the pay for a brake replacement is the same whether it takes 45 minutes or two hours. It rewards speed, and that is both its point and its main criticism.

Fleet management is the coordinated running of a company's vehicles across their whole life, covering acquisition, licensing, maintenance, driver compliance, fuel, utilisation and disposal, so the fleet meets operational demand at a controlled cost and inside the law. It is a discipline, not a piece of software.

Fleet telematics is the use of an in-vehicle device or built-in connected system to record location, driving behaviour, fuel use and engine diagnostics and send it to the fleet office, so vehicles can be tracked, routed and maintained without anyone calling the driver. Insurers use similar data for a different job.

A fleet tyre inspection is the routine check of every tyre on a fleet's vehicles and trailers for tread depth, inflation pressure, sidewall and tread damage, and wheel security, recorded so that a worn or damaged tyre is replaced before it fails or puts the vehicle outside the legal limit.

Floor plan financing is a revolving credit line a dealership uses to buy vehicle inventory, secured by the vehicles themselves, with each unit's principal repaid when it sells. It is the reason every day a car sits on the lot has a price attached to it.

First Notification of Loss (FNOL) is the first report a policyholder or third party makes to an insurer after an incident. It is the point at which a claim file is opened, a reserve is set, and the claims clock starts running.

Follow-up cadence is the planned sequence of contact attempts made on a lead: how many touches, on which channels, spaced across how many days. It is written before the lead arrives rather than decided in the moment, which is what separates a cadence from a habit.

A forklift daily check is the visual and functional inspection an operator carries out on a lift truck before the first use of each shift, covering tyres, forks, mast, hydraulics, brakes, steering, lights and horn, with every defect recorded and any unsafe truck taken out of use before work starts.

The four square is a desking worksheet used in car sales, divided into four boxes: trade-in allowance, vehicle price, down payment and monthly payment, negotiated against one another. It has a real purpose, and a documented history of being used to obscure those numbers.

Frame rate explained: what fps means, the difference between 24, 30 and 60 fps, and which frame rate to use for business and customer videos.

A fraud indicator is an observable feature of a claim, an application or a claimant's behaviour that is statistically associated with fraud and is used to decide how much scrutiny a file gets. It is a reason to look more closely, never a finding of dishonesty.

Front end gross is the profit a dealership makes on the vehicle itself, calculated as the selling price minus what the car cost the store, including reconditioning and pack. It is one half of total gross per unit, sitting opposite the back end gross earned on finance and insurance.

Field service management is the coordination of work carried out away from the employer's own premises: raising and prioritising jobs, matching them to technicians with the right skills and parts, and closing out a verified record of what was done on site. Shortened to FSM, it runs from request to billable job.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is Regulation (EU) 2016/679, the European law governing how organisations process personal data about people in the EU. It sets processing principles, requires a lawful basis, gives individuals enforceable rights, and carries fines up to 4% of worldwide turnover.

Geotagging is the practice of attaching geographic coordinates to a file such as a photograph, video or social post, normally recorded automatically by a smartphone at the moment of capture and stored in the file's location metadata fields.

Ghost broking is the fraudulent sale of motor insurance by someone posing as a legitimate broker, where the victim pays for cover that is either wholly fake or genuine but obtained on falsified details, and usually discovers the problem only at a police stop or a declined claim.

A goodwill repair is work a manufacturer, importer or dealer pays for in whole or in part when no contract obliges them to pay anything. It is discretionary, usually offered to keep a customer, and it is what a service department turns to when a component fails just outside cover.

A GPS-stamped photo is a photograph that carries the location where it was taken, either printed visibly on the image as coordinates and an address, or stored invisibly in the file's metadata. It is used as proof that a person or asset was at a given place at a given time.

Guided capture is a method of collecting photos, video and answers in which the requesting organisation, rather than the person holding the phone, decides what gets recorded, in what order, and with what instruction at each step. The participant follows prompts instead of guessing.

A guided workflow is a defined sequence of steps that leads a person through a task one instruction at a time, in an order the organisation set in advance, rather than leaving them to work out what to do next on their own. The knowledge sits in the sequence, not in the person following it.

Handover is the process of explaining and formally transferring a vehicle to its new owner: the walk around the car, the demonstration of the controls, the paperwork, and the introduction to the service department. Delivery is the event. Handover is what happens inside it.

A handover certificate is the document recording that completed work has been formally accepted by the party receiving it, on a stated date, transferring responsibility for the works and starting the contractual clocks that run from acceptance. It records acceptance, not the absence of defects.

A handover inspection is the joint check carried out at the moment responsibility for an asset passes from one party to another, witnessed and signed by both. It is less a damage list than a timestamp on liability, which is why it is the record that surfaces in contract disputes.

A handover video is a short personal video, recorded by the salesperson or delivery specialist, that shows the customer their specific vehicle and explains its key features and controls before or at delivery. It replaces or reinforces the walkthrough that happens at the physical handover.

Harness inspection is the examination of a safety harness and its lanyards, connectors and energy absorber for damage that would stop it arresting a fall. It combines a tactile and visual pre-use check by the wearer with a recorded detailed inspection by a competent person at set intervals.

A hash function is a calculation that turns an input of any size into a fixed-length value, and a cryptographic hash function does so in a way that makes it computationally infeasible to work backwards to the input or to find two different inputs sharing one output.

A health and safety inspection is a planned examination of a workplace, site or piece of equipment to check that actual conditions match the standards that apply, with the findings recorded so they can be assigned and closed out. It looks at what is true now, not at what might go wrong later.

A HGV daily walkaround check is the inspection a driver carries out on a heavy goods vehicle, and any trailer, before its first journey of the day, to confirm it is safe and roadworthy. DVSA guidance sets out what to check, and the result is recorded whether or not a defect is found.

A hire agreement is the contract by which an owner lets a hirer take possession and use of plant, equipment, or a vehicle for a period in return for hire charges, keeping ownership throughout. In UK plant and tool hire it is the standard term for what vehicle and US markets call a rental agreement.

A home insurance claim is a request for repair, replacement, or payment under a household policy after damage, loss, or theft at an insured address. It covers two distinct sections, buildings and contents, and which section responds decides the evidence, the supplier, and the timescale.

Hours per repair order, shortened to HPRO, is the average number of labour hours sold on each repair order in a period, calculated as total sold hours divided by repair orders closed. It measures how much work each vehicle visit produces, not how fast the workshop gets through it.

Identified work is the additional repair or maintenance a technician finds during a vehicle health check or inspection that the customer has not yet authorised. It is tracked as a value and an hours figure and becomes sold work, deferred work or declined work once the customer decides.

Image authentication is the process of establishing that a photo or video is what it claims to be: recorded on a particular device at a particular time and place, and unchanged since. In evidence capture it rests on session recording, a server receipt time, a digital seal and a verifiable record of the session.

Image forensics is the examination of a digital photo or video for evidence of how it was produced and whether it was altered, using metadata, compression history, noise patterns and physical consistency. It produces indications rather than verdicts, and a clean result is not proof that a file is genuine.

Image quality validation is the automated check that a submitted photo is technically fit for its purpose, testing properties such as focus, exposure, resolution and framing before the image is accepted. It judges the picture, never the subject.

In the automotive industry, an Inventory Management System (IMS) is a crucial tool that helps car dealerships manage their inventory effectively. This system allows dealerships to keep track of their stock, manage orders, and ensure that they have the right amount of vehicles at the right time. It's a complex system that involves various processes and technologies, all aimed at optimizing inventory levels and improving business performance.

Incoming goods inspection is the conformity check carried out on materials, components or finished products at the point of receipt, before they are booked into stock or released to production, to confirm that what arrived matches what was ordered and meets the agreed specification.

Indemnity is the principle that an insurance payment restores the policyholder to the financial position they were in immediately before the loss, and no better. It is the rule that almost every settlement mechanic, from actual cash value to betterment to salvage, exists to enforce.