Recon Workflow Goal Times: The 5-Day Benchmark

A car should spend about one day in inspection, one day in repair, and no more than a day and a half in detail. Add fast RO write-ups and fast approvals on top of that, and a dealership following this structure gets a vehicle from acquisition to frontline-ready in five days or less. That’s the benchmark Bobby and Josh laid out on this month’s episode of All Things Recon (ATR), Rapid Recon Pro’s monthly webinar on recon best practices, and it’s worth breaking down step by step.

Why goal times matter more than step count

Dealers sometimes push back on a workflow with a lot of steps, worried that more steps means more complexity. Bobby’s take: a longer workflow isn’t more complicated, it’s just better drill-down. Each additional step gives you a cleaner read on your bottleneck report and your step report, so when something’s slow, you know exactly where. The real risk isn’t step count. It’s ambiguity: a step nobody can define clearly enough to hand to a new hire.

The recon workflow, step by step

Here’s how the goal times shake out across a standard recon workflow:

• Incoming: no meaningful time here. If the car’s on the lot and ready, move it straight to RO write-up. If it’s not ready (in transit, on a trade hold), that gets its own step so the incoming bucket stays clean.
• RO write-up (opening the RO): 30 minutes max. Josh’s team sets timers that turn yellow at 15 minutes and red at 30. This step is just opening the repair order and handing custody to service, not doing any of the actual inspection work.
• Technician inspection: about one day (24 hours) on average.
• Parts quote and labor quote: 30 to 60 minutes each.
• Manager (UCM) approval: 15 to 30 minutes. Josh calls this one of the biggest levers in the whole process.
• Building approved lines into the RO: another 30 minutes.
• Repair: about one day (24 hours) on average.
• Repairs-complete confirmation: 30 minutes, just verifying the work is done and the RO is closed out correctly.
• Detail: 24 to 36 hours, so a day to a day and a half.
• Photos: ideally within the hour, handled in-house rather than farmed out to a photography service.

Stack those up and you land around five days, with room for the occasional car that needs real transmission work or a body shop trip.

Why inspection and repair are separate steps

Splitting inspection from repair looks redundant until you see what it buys you. First, it’s unambiguous for the technician: if a car’s sitting in the inspection step, that’s the tech’s first look at it. If it’s in repair, the approval already went through, parts are in, and the lines are on the RO. No chasing down a ticket to figure out what’s actually approved.

Second, it’s a transparency layer for everyone downstream. That car is probably already listed online. Sales needs to know whether a customer can test drive it today or in two days, and that’s a different answer depending on whether the car’s in inspection or repair. Splitting the steps means the whole dealership, not just the shop, knows exactly where a unit stands.

Where the quick wins live: the controllables

Bobby’s term for the post-inspection steps (parts quote, labor quote, approval, building the RO lines) is “controllables.” They’re not at the mercy of technician skill level or your dispatch process, only your attention. That makes them the fastest place to cut time out of recon before you tackle harder structural questions like staffing or shop layout.

Approval speed gets singled out for a reason. Slow approvals don’t just cost the minutes a manager sits on a decision. They train technicians to move on to the next car and park the one waiting on a decision, which adds two or three days to that vehicle by the time someone circles back. Get approvals done in 15 to 30 minutes and the rest of the controllables tend to fall in line behind it.

Keep the chain of accountability unambiguous

The workflow itself is only half the job. The other half is staffing it so accountability never gets fuzzy. A new hire should be able to sit down in front of your workflow and understand exactly what each step means and who owns it. Dedicated recon technicians, or at minimum one person whose job is pushing units through, keep used cars from quietly losing out to customer-pay work on a busy service day.

What about body shop bottlenecks?

A viewer question during the episode: what do you do about body shop delays? The honest answer is that body shops are rarely fast, and you’re relying on people outside the dealership to move at your pace. The fix isn’t complicated: get your body shop logged into your recon tool so they can see what’s coming, tag or note the work needed (photos of the damage help), and loop in your CSM for a performance consultation if it’s a recurring problem.