How to Reduce Contracts in Transit: a Practical Checklist

The fastest lever to reduce contracts in transit is a daily build-a-deal meeting reviewing every open deal by age, not a switch to e-contracting. Paper packages run 9 to 10 business days from signature to funding; e-contracting cuts that to about 24 hours. Stores that swap tools before fixing incomplete submission just move the bottleneck onto a faster rail.

That distinction matters because most CIT advice you’ll find online skips straight to the tooling answer. It’s not wrong. It’s incomplete, and incomplete advice is exactly how a dealership ends up with an e-contracting platform and a CIT balance that barely moved.

Why “just switch to e-contracting” doesn’t fix it alone

Here’s the mechanism paper actually breaks. A deal signed Saturday gets packaged and mailed by Tuesday, the lender receives it Thursday, and funding lands roughly 9 to 10 business days after signing. Add a stipulation request or a resign, and you’re looking at 11 to 13 business days. (F&I and Showroom, “The CIT Fix”) Dealertrack’s own data puts the average paper package at 5 days in transit before it’s even in the lender’s hands. (Dealertrack)

E-contracting removes the mail leg entirely. That’s real and it’s the single biggest structural fix available. But it doesn’t touch the other reason contracts stall: incomplete submission. If a deal goes to the lender missing a stip (proof of income, proof of residence, ID, insurance) or with a document error, the lender bounces it back for correction whether it arrived by mail or by API. A deal jacket that was 80% ready on paper is still 80% ready electronically. You’ve made the transit fast; you haven’t made the deal complete.

This is the trap: a store spends the budget and the change-management effort to go electronic, funding speed improves for the deals that were clean to begin with, and the CIT balance a month later is disappointingly close to where it started, because the deals that were stalling for process reasons are still stalling for process reasons.

The checklist, ordered by root cause

Work these in order. Each one fixes a different failure mode, and the process fixes are cheaper, faster to implement, and address more of the balance than most stores expect.

1. Run a daily build-a-deal accountability meeting

This is the single fastest lever, and it costs nothing to implement. Every outstanding contract gets reviewed by age: what’s holding it, who owns the next action, and when it’s expected to clear. Stores without this structure discover deals that have been sitting three, five, ten days because no single person was accountable for pushing them forward. (F&I and Showroom)

The reason this works faster than any tooling change is that it surfaces problems while they’re still cheap to fix. A missing stip caught on day 2 is a phone call. A missing stip caught on day 9, after the lender has already bounced the deal once, is a curtailment risk and an aging-balance line item your controller has to explain.

2. Standardize what “complete” means before a deal is submitted

Root cause here is variance: different F&I managers submitting deals at different levels of readiness, because “complete” lives in someone’s head rather than on a checklist. A written, enforced pre-submission checklist (every stip attached, every disclosure signed, VIN and lienholder fields double-checked) catches the errors that would otherwise come back as a lender rejection days later. This is the same discipline that prevents DMV title rejections, and it’s worth building once and enforcing every time, not re-deciding deal by deal.

3. Collect stipulations at the point of sale, not after the bounce

Stips (proof of income, proof of residence, ID, insurance) are the friction point where closings stall. If your process is “submit the deal, wait for the lender to ask for what’s missing,” you’ve built a round trip into every funding cycle by design. Pulling that collection forward, so the F&I manager has proof of income and residence in hand before the deal is submitted, removes the round trip entirely. Some lenders are attacking the same friction point from the other side: non-documentary validation tools now cross-check buyer data against income and identity records so certain deals can skip the stip request altogether. (AutoSuccess, “Skip the Stip”) Either way, if your CIT balance is being dragged out by repeated stip requests, that’s a process fix before it’s a tooling fix. Our sibling post on stip resolution time goes deeper on where those requests actually originate.

4. Align F&I compensation with funding speed

Some stores already tie F&I manager commission to how fast a deal funds, using payout tiers around 100%, 75%, 50%, and 0% depending on speed. (F&I and Showroom) Whether or not you formalize a tiered structure, the underlying point holds: if funding speed isn’t visible to the person closing the deal, it isn’t a priority to them, and CIT aging becomes an accounting problem instead of a sales-floor one. We cover the mechanics of that incentive structure in why F&I commission gets tied to funding speed.

5. Move to e-contracting and ELT

Now, and only now, is the tooling change worth making, because it’s landing on a process that’s already producing complete deals. E-contracting takes the 9-to-10-day paper cycle down to roughly 24 hours by removing the packaging and mail legs entirely. (F&I and Showroom) An aged CIT balance is one of the clearest signals of funding delays or compliance issues sitting in your operation. (ACV Auctions glossary) One widely cited example describes a dealership carrying an $800,000 CIT balance that froze cash needed for payoffs, restocking, and advertising. (F&I and Showroom) That’s the number e-contracting is meant to shrink, and it does, but only for deals that were ready to fund in the first place. For a direct look at what the switch actually buys you in transit time, see e-contracting vs. paper: the real funding-speed difference.

6. Read your CIT aging report daily, not monthly

The last step closes the loop. A CIT aging report broken out by day bucket (0 to 3 days, 4 to 7, 8-plus) tells you whether the first five steps are actually working, and it catches the deal that slipped through before it becomes a curtailment problem or an audit finding. A single monthly glance at the total balance hides which deals are new and normal versus which are genuinely stuck. Our guide on reading the CIT aging report like an operator walks through how to build the buckets and what thresholds should trigger escalation.

FAQ

What’s the single fastest lever to reduce CIT? A daily build-a-deal accountability meeting that reviews every outstanding contract by age. It surfaces stalled deals while they’re still a quick fix, before they compound into a large aged balance that shows up on next month’s financial review.

Does switching to e-contracting alone fix CIT? No. It removes the mail-transit delay, which is real and significant, but if deals are still submitted incomplete, the lender still bounces them back for stipulations regardless of whether the package arrived by mail or by API. Process discipline (pre-submission checklists, stip collection at point of sale) has to be in place first, or you’re just moving the same bottleneck onto a faster medium.

Where this fits in the bigger picture

Getting this right is a process problem before it’s a technology problem, and process problems are exactly where document review, stip verification, and deal-completeness checks stop depending on whoever happens to be at the desk that day. For the full picture of what CIT is, how it’s calculated, and how it interacts with floorplan and curtailment, start with our complete guide to contracts in transit, and if your balance already looks high, our diagnostic checklist for why your CIT is high will help you find which of the six steps above is actually broken. If deal-completeness checking is the bottleneck at your volume, that’s the kind of document-heavy, rule-based work Deskflow is built to run end to end.