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.