Looking Back

Computing Dynamics Inc. (CDI) was incorporated in 1994 by Gordon and France Johnson. Gordon began CDI’s mission after working with clients in the automotive industry for many years and noticing an opportunity to not only save dealerships time and money by enhancing their monthly reporting process, but saving them some headaches by offering them outstanding, personalized support for CDI’s products and services. Over the next 23 years, Gordon and France quietly built their business around the expressed needs of their customers, many of whom still provide their trusted insights and experience to help us shape our products and services even to this day. By truly listening to and learning about their customers over the years, the business has grown almost entirely by customer referrals to over 500 dealerships right across Canada – From Victoria, British Columbia to St. John’s, Newfoundland.

Finex was built in 1995 to simplify the month-end process, which we know to commonly be a time-consuming, manual process for automotive controllers and secretary-treasurers. Hours or even days are spent sourcing key expense and performance indicators from current & historical factory statements, and then compiling them into various report templates before manually distributing to each manager and stakeholder the appropriate reports. Finex is a solution which uses automation to do all that heavy lifting for you, so that your accounting and leadership teams can access key insights within minutes, and spend more time using that performance data each month rather than sourcing and compiling it.

Over the years, Finex has continued to differentiate itself as the only automated reporting solution which is DMS agnostic, so that your reporting will be consistent even across multiple stores, vehicle brands, and/or multiple DMS providers. This protects your investment and prevents reporting disruption if new stores are acquired by your organization, or if your dealership changes its DMS vendor.

Eclipse came along in 2004, after learning from our customers that budgeting and forecasting was either a lengthy, painful process each year for their dealership – or in many cases, was not being done at all for lack of time and tools.

CDI wanted to provide a solution for its Finex customers that would take their monthly reporting and turn it into an interactive program which would use the customer’s financial history as well as current industry standards to generate a highly intelligent forecasting starting point each year. From there, managers can easily make adjustments and run scenarios while Eclipse records your work and balances your changes across the budget as you go. Eclipse provides a robust set of working tools while remaining simple and easy for any user to navigate. Each year, we continue to enhance its tools and capabilities to make budgeting easy and accessible for all dealerships.

Looking Ahead

Erin Adair, CDI’s current CEO, spent 4 years working with Gordon and France at CDI as an employee. Erin started out here as a financial reporting consultant, before moving into accounting and eventually becoming the company’s controller. During her time as an employee, Erin developed an intimate technical understanding of our products and built valued relationships with many of our clients. Erin’s accounting background, combined with her technical knowledge and understanding of how our clients in the automotive industry do business, makes her a tremendous asset to our clients. It’s this passion for what we do and strong connection with our customers that led her to purchasing the business in 2017, in order to continue CDI’s legacy as a customer-centric, family-run Canadian business. As we move forward in our 25th year as a company, we continue to put our customers at the heart of everything we do. In 2019, our branding was refreshed to reflect our commitment to continue evolving with the North American auto retail market, and continue to deliver products and services that are at the cutting edge of the industry we have proudly served for the last 25 years. But rest assured that you will continue to hear the same friendly voices answering your calls at our office (and perhaps a new one here and there as we continue to grow our team!), and you can expect the same unwavering commitment to exceeding your expectations in everything we do.