AutoAp (The Recall Company) Inventory Monitoring

Questions this answers

• "The recall disclosure form is failing to print with an error about the VIN. The vehicle definitely has a VIN in the system — what's going on?"

When the recall disclosure will not print

The recall disclosure is not a stored form that gets filled in. Each time you print it, the document is fetched from AutoAp (The Recall Company) for one specific VIN, and that VIN has to be a complete 17-character VIN. Two different messages tell you two different things:

• AutoAp (The Recall Company) recall disclosure form cannot be generated: Vehicle VIN is missing — no VIN could be found at all on the record you printed from.
• Auto Recall Disclosure could not be generated. Please try again later. — a VIN was found but no document came back. The most common cause is a VIN that is not exactly 17 characters: one that was typed short, has a space or dash in it, or was entered as a partial VIN. It reads like a temporary outage, but usually the VIN is the problem.

So when the vehicle plainly has a VIN and the form still fails, check the length and characters of the VIN rather than the vehicle record as a whole. Count the characters and remove any spaces, then print again.

Check the VIN on the record the disclosure is for. Printing the disclosure for a trade-in uses the trade's own VIN, not the vehicle being sold, so a trade entered with a partial VIN fails even though the sale vehicle is complete. If the trade has no VIN, the sale vehicle's VIN is used instead, which is why the form sometimes prints with the wrong vehicle's recall information — fill in the trade's VIN to fix that.

The request can also time out when AutoAp (The Recall Company) is slow to respond. There is no stored copy to fall back on, so nothing prints; wait a moment and print it again.

One more thing worth knowing about this form: it is always left out of an eSign envelope, even if you tick it with the rest of the packet. It has to be printed and signed on paper.

Introducing AutoAp (The Recall Company) Inventory Monitoring! A more automated and responsive way for recall information!

Previously, users would have to go into each vehicle, click the “Check For Recalls” button which would then charge a dollar’s worth of ePay credit. Once the ePay credit had been spent, a moment or so later, the user would be told whether this vehicle has an open recall(s) or not. If there was a recall(s), the user could click the related link and a slide out would appear with the recall details. If users wanted to disclose this information they could not print this information for their consumers, they were forced to go else where.

DeskManager users will no longer need to pay for each check, nor manually need to 'Check for Recall'. With the release of ‘AutoAp (The Recall Company) Inventory Monitoring’, we are doing away with charging and will be proactively checking vehicles added.

Firstly, there is no need for any setup. DeskManager will automatically check VIN’s added via the “Add Vehicle”, “Book Vehicle to Watchlist” and the Deal > Trade-In slide out. Vehicles added through WebManager (including the mobile app) will also be checked without any extra effort on the user’s end. 

Inventory List View Results:

Vehicle Detail Results:

Trade-In Form:

Secondly, users will have the ability to email, download and/or print the “AutoAp (The Recall Company) Recall Disclosure” PDF provided by AutoAp (The Recall Company). Users can access to this PDF in multiple places through out DMO. Including the Inventory listview, Vehicles details page, Inventory Forms and Deal Forms print page. 

Vehicle Details page with recall slideout:

Trade-In page with recall slideout:

Deal Print Form Page:


Inventory Print Form Page:

Last by not least, since vehicles do not leave the factory with Open Recalls and at times are not discovered until months later. DeskManager will actively be monitoring those same the VINs with nightly checks.