About the operator
Velocity Automotive, backed by New York-based Etium Capital, is hailed as a top franchisee within the Meineke platform and was recognized by Driven Brands as 2024 Multi-Unit Operator of the Year.
The challenges
Car parts were sold underpriced and reviewing the
tickets took all day
Velocity Automotive services 88,000+ cars yearly across the country. Every car that pulls into a bay presents an opportunity to leak margin:
- Underpriced parts
- Unauthorized discounts
- Big tickets without a deposit
Velocity knew that it was important to catch these problems, but doing so meant manually reviewing tickets one at a time. Regional managers, who should have been focused on training staff and pursuing new growth initiatives, were instead spending a large share of their time reviewing tickets.
“We do 1,700 cars a week on average. I basically stared at the screen and went through job by job. This was hours of my day every single day.”
The AR process was painstaking, time-consuming
and error prone
National fleet customers pay in weekly batches, net of franchise fees, so nearly every fleet ticket needed a manual write-off before it could be cleared. Other payment channels presented their own reconciliation challenges. All of that work fell to business leaders on Sunday nights.
“Even if it's not complex, we still need to be very accurate. Because the downstream effects of AR getting cleared improperly just turns into an absolute nightmare.”
The solutions
A Ticket Review agent that turns missed margin into
same-day wins
Glidepath deployed a Ticket Review agent that checks every ticket against the operator's own rules:
- Parts priced below matrix
- Gross profit below target
- At-cost mistakes
- Discounts outside policy
- Missing deposits on big jobs
- Warranty errors
The agent combines deterministic rules-based checks with an LLM-powered review of the full ticket to uncover additional opportunities. Flags go straight to each store, with a digest to regional leaders several times a day and a roll-up for the COO. Instead of pulling reports and opening tickets, leaders read the summary and know exactly which three tickets need a follow-up with the store GM.
“This is what I was doing all day... being in the reactive seat and putting fires out” says Joe. “Compared to what I'm doing now, which is actually working on the business. That's how important Glidepath was to us because, there was no way to continue doing what I was doing.”
An AR Reconciliation agent that clears fleet payments in minutes at any volume
Glidepath's AR Reconciliation agent now autonomously clears AR, work that previously meant combing through ticket after ticket, making manual adjustments and updating various systems. Glidepath’s agent also provides a historical AR aging report that gives finance auditable support for the AR balance on its financial statements.
“We'd have to hire somebody just to book AR if we didn't have the agent. We would need another person.”
