Lot Settings That Save Separately: Business Hours, the Finance Contact, and Numbering

Three parts of lot setup do not save the way the rest of the screen does. Business hours are stored with your website listing rather than with the lot record, saving a lot writes through to a contact record and can create a finance-company contact for you, and the numbering screen saves every lot at once. Each one produces a symptom that looks like data loss and is not.

This article is only about those three behaviours on the lot and numbering screens. For what each field on a lot means, see Lot Details; for who is allowed to open the setup screens at all, see the permissions articles.

Questions this answers

• "I changed the name and phone number on one of our lots but the business hours I also typed in didn't save — why would only part of my changes stick?"
• "After I edited our lot's info, a new contact showed up for finance that I never created — where did that come from?"
• "I edited the numbering settings for just one of our lots, but now it looks like the other lots' numbers got reset to blank too — what happened?"

Business hours save separately from the rest of the lot

The hours on a lot are kept with your website and mobile listing information, not with the lot's name, phone and address. They are only written when two things are true: the lot is active — or a new lot still being set up — and the whole hours block was submitted with the form, both sets of open and close times together with the display choices.

If either is not true, the rest of your edits save normally and the hours are quietly skipped. No error appears, which is exactly why it reads as "only half my changes stuck".

What to do:

1. Re-open the lot and look at the hours as stored, rather than at what you typed. That tells you whether the save took.
2. Fill in the complete hours block — every open and close time you want, not just the one day you meant to change — and save the lot again.
3. Re-open it once more to confirm. If the hours still do not hold, check the lot's status; hours are not saved for a lot that is not active.

Saving a lot updates — or creates — a finance-company contact

Saving a lot does more than update the lot. It also keeps a matching contact record in step: the company name, address, city, state, ZIP, county, business phone, fax and email are pushed onto that contact from the lot.

If the lot has no default finance-company contact yet, one is created during that save, filed as a finance company, named and addressed from the lot itself. That is the contact that appears out of nowhere after a lot edit. It is system-created, it represents your own dealership as a finance company, and it is not a duplicate customer record.

Handle it like this:

• Details are wrong — correct the lot and save. The contact is updated from the lot, so editing the lot is the reliable way to fix it.
• You do not want it — deleting it does not make it stay gone. The next time that lot is saved without one, another is created. Leave it in place.
• The name looks odd — it takes the company and contact names from the lot record, so blank or placeholder names on the lot show up on the contact.

The numbering screen saves every lot at once

Stock number and accounting number setup is a single save covering all of your lots and all of the reference types shown on that screen — not just the lot whose figures you edited. Anything the page did not submit is stored as empty, as zero, or as an unticked checkbox.

The practical effect for a multi-lot dealership: if the other lots' prefixes, suffixes and next numbers were not filled in and visible when you saved, they can come back blank with their next number at zero.

So treat that screen as a whole-dealership form:

1. Before saving, scroll through and check every lot's prefix, suffix and next number is showing the value you want kept — not just the one you came to change.
2. Save, then re-open the screen and read the values back for each lot.
3. Re-enter anything that came back blank or zero, and save again.

Two details worth knowing while you are in there: trade numbers take some of their settings — whether numbers can be typed by hand, and the VIN-digit option — from the stock number settings for the same lot, so changing them for stock changes them for trades. And if a next number came back as zero, set it above the highest number you have already used so you do not get duplicate stock numbers.

If numbers were already issued from a blanked setting and you now have duplicates, contact support rather than renumbering records by hand.