Delivery Readiness

Sold get-ready process for dealerships

Delivery checklist, PDI, stips, and due bills

Useful for: General Managers, Sales Managers, Delivery Coordinators, F&I, Registration/Admin, PDI, Detailing, Parts, and Accessories teams.

Selling a vehicle is the beginning of a process, not the end. After a customer signs, a dealership must coordinate across funding, registration, PDI, detailing, accessories, and customer readiness before the vehicle is genuinely ready for delivery. When that process is managed through disconnected spreadsheets, group chats, and verbal updates, blockers accumulate quietly until they surface on delivery day.

What “sold get-ready” actually covers

Sold get-ready — sometimes called make-ready or pre-delivery — refers to all the steps required to move a sold vehicle from deal-agreed to confirmed-ready-for-delivery. It includes every task that must be completed across departments before the customer arrives. For most dealerships, that means at least six distinct workstreams running in parallel.

Funding and stips

The F&I office must clear any lender stipulations before funding is confirmed. Common stips include proof of income, insurance documentation, contract amendments, and identity verification. Contracts in transit must be tracked. Until funding clears, the deal is not commercially complete, and releasing the vehicle carries financial risk. Missing stips are one of the most common causes of delivery-day delays.

Registration and plates

In Ontario and across Canada, admin staff must process vehicle registration, submit for plates or permit, and confirm insurance is in place before the vehicle is legally roadworthy for the customer. Plate delays, permit processing lag, and insurance confirmation gaps are regular blockers that do not always surface until the customer is already en route.

PDI and make-ready

Pre-delivery inspection is a non-negotiable quality step, but it is only one part of vehicle readiness. After PDI, the vehicle must also go through detail, final presentation checks, and any deferred service work. Scheduling conflicts, bay availability, and parts delays can each push back PDI and make-ready completion, especially when the service department is not aware of which vehicles have customer promise times.

Accessories and due-bill items

Accessories promised at point of sale — floor mats, tinting, tow packages, remote starters — must be tracked through parts ordering, stock availability, and fitment scheduling. We owe items and due-bill obligations recorded on the deal must also be completed or formally acknowledged before delivery. These items are frequently missed because they live in a separate conversation from the rest of the deal-to-delivery workflow.

Customer-ready steps

The customer side of readiness is often tracked loosely or not at all. Appointment confirmation, insurance confirmation, outstanding customer documents, and feature walkthrough readiness all need to be verified before the delivery appointment. A customer who arrives for a vehicle that is not ready — or a dealership that is unprepared to deliver — creates a poor experience that is entirely preventable.

Why spreadsheets and group chats fail

Most dealerships coordinate the sold get-ready process through a combination of shared spreadsheets, printed logs, WhatsApp threads, and verbal updates. Each of these works for a short window with a small number of vehicles. As volume grows or team turnover occurs, visibility breaks down. Blockers stop surfacing until they are urgent. Ownership becomes unclear. Managers resort to chasing individual departments for status updates multiple times a day.

The core problem is not that people are not working — it is that the work is not visible across departments in a form that allows early intervention.

What a structured sold get-ready process looks like

A structured sold get-ready process makes every blocker visible, assigns a clear owner to each open item, and surfaces promise-date risk before it becomes a customer-facing problem. Managers can see the daily delivery queue at a glance — which vehicles are ready, which are at risk, and which are blocked — without needing to chase individual teams.

This is what deal-to-delivery control is designed to provide: one operational view of sold-vehicle readiness, from deal agreed to confirmed delivery, with blockers surfaced early and ownership clear at every step.

Related reading

• Dealership Delivery Readiness Checklist: 40 questions before the customer arrives →
• How to prevent delivery-day surprises at a dealership →
• PDI vs delivery readiness: why inspection is not the whole problem →
• We owe and due bill tracking before vehicle delivery →
• Contracts in transit, stips, and delivery delays →