How Town Auto Group turned dealership payroll chaos into a simple system that actually works

The challenge: a patchwork of systems that wasn't built to manage the compliance complexity of a multi-type workforce

Before Rippling, Town Auto Group's three-person HR generalist team was managing five distinct pay types across two locations, and doing it with tools that weren't designed for any of them. incident. Their Dealer Management System (“DMS”), Reynolds and Reynolds, handled vehicle inventory, accounting, payroll, and limited HR processes. It offered time tracking but required additional manual oversight to meet Washington state compliance standards.

Washington state requires time to be tracked to the minute. No rounding, and no estimates. Employees would clock in, clock out, and the system would reflect an approximation of their time. For Diane Cruickshank, HR Assistant at Town Auto, the way time was presented in Reynolds made it difficult for managers to easily review time to ensure accuracy.

Payroll relied heavily on manual spreadsheets, including PTO tracking, which made it difficult to clearly understand how pay was calculated. This lack of transparency led to frequent questions and uncertainty around earnings. At the same time, the complexity of managing multiple spreadsheets and formulas introduced recurring errors, further undermining trust in the accuracy of payroll.

Why Rippling: customizable, flexible, and built to grow

Town Auto Group's HR Director evaluated multiple platforms before the company committed to Rippling. Cruickshank came on board near the end of that evaluation and spoke with a few of the finalists herself. What stood out wasn't any single feature; it was the philosophy of the platform.

“Customization” meant more than surface-level changes. It allowed Town Auto Group to use familiar naming conventions, configure workflows to match how their team actually operated, and extend the platform when out-of-the-box functionality fell short. For example, when they needed to connect sales data from their DMS to support commission-based payroll, they were able to quickly build a custom app for SPIFF tracking. That flexibility, paired with consistent product improvements, made Rippling the clear choice.

A platform that combines power and ease

Like most multi-brand dealer groups, Town Auto Group manages a highly complex workforce. Made up of hourly employees, commission-based salespeople, flat-rate technicians, non-exempt salaried workers, and overtime-exempt managers. All their employees have different pay structures, overtime rules, and Washington state compliance considerations.

Where other platforms make complexity more apparent, Rippling helps streamline and simplify it.

Despite all the deep integrations, compliance rules, and workflows running behind the scenes, the user interface stays consistent wherever you are in the system. That's not something Cruickshank takes for granted.

The contrast with Reynolds and Reynolds is stark. The system is powerful, but its depth shows: lots of navigation layers, lots of clicking, and a design that hasn't kept pace. In Rippling, Cruickshank says, regardless of which part of the product she's using, it looks and works the same. "Every time product improvements launch, they're always better and stronger," she says.

Payroll that closed 10 hours faster

The payroll process at a multi-pay-type dealership is complicated. Commission data lived in Reynolds and Reynolds. Flat-rate technician hours requires their own calculations. Washington state paid family leave, sick leave, vacation, and FMLA each interact with payroll in specific ways that have to be configured correctly to show up accurately on employee pay stubs.

When Town Auto Group first moved to Rippling, the team immediately shaved off 10 hours from the payroll process. "When we first joined Rippling, we immediately cut payroll processing down by 10 hours," Cruickshank says. "Since then, we've reduced the time it takes to run payroll even more."

Today, the team continues to refine their workflows. The payroll team is working on naming conventions for pay lines, transparency on pay stubs, and ways to further streamline how payroll data maps to their general ledger export that flows back into Reynolds and Reynolds for accounting.

A custom app that streamlines sales SPIFFs

Sales SPIFFs and bonuses—the performance-based incentives Town Auto Group pays its sales and service teams—once followed a manual, multi-step path to get into employees’ hands. Managers tracked payouts in spreadsheets, which were then sent to the accounting director. From there, the accounting director manually issued separate physical checks through the DMS, creating a slow and cumbersome process for both SPIFFs and bonus payments.

To streamline this process, Town Auto Group built a custom Rippling app that routes Bonus and SPIFFs data directly through payroll. Now, managers enter SPIFF and bonus amounts through the app, the data flows into Rippling Payroll, and the bonus lands in the employee's direct deposit alongside their regular paycheck with full visibility into the tax calculation.

For Cruickshank, discovering custom apps opened up a new way of thinking about what's possible. "When I first learned about Rippling’s custom apps, I was all over it," she says. "I have like a whole list of things that we plan to do with them." The SPIFF app is just the start.

Rippling AI turned compliance research from a chore to an afterthought

Washington’s unemployment, wage, and compliance requirements—spanning unemployment claims, employment verifications, and L&I requests—are detailed and highly specific. Each request requires precise reporting on hours worked, overtime, PTO, bonuses, the difference between a base earning and commission earnings, as well as an average income over a specified span of time. Gathering this information used to take Cruickshank about 20 minutes per request—not because it was difficult, but because it was tedious: navigating multiple systems, filtering data, cross-referencing records, and exporting the right details.

20 minutes per request doesn't sound too bad until you're staring down a stack of them.

With Rippling AI, she just used a prompt to ask for it. The system would pull the data, apply the calculations, and provide the information needed within seconds.

Compliance baked into every clock-in

Rippling captures time punches with full precision, down to the second. For a team that could face regulatory challenges based on timekeeping records, that accuracy is critical.

To take it a step further, a geofenced mobile app means employees can clock in directly from their workstation within a defined perimeter at their location. It keeps records clean and accurate which provides compliance.

Document management built to hold up to scrutiny

Town Auto Group uses Rippling to build policy documents that automatically pull in job titles, legal names, and employee-specific data, then distributes them for digital signature. Each policy is pushed individually, so every sign-off creates its own time-stamped record.

The third-party document management system previously used lacked the ability to easily update policies or track acknowledgments, making ongoing compliance difficult to manage. By moving document management into Rippling, all HR and payroll documents are now centralized and simple to maintain. With the addition of document folders, signed documents are organized and easy to locate for both employees and administrators. Most importantly, the team now has full visibility into policy distribution and acknowledgment—allowing them to quickly confirm when a policy was shared and when each employee signed it. This level of traceability was difficult to navigate under the previous system.

The impact

Compliance lookups: 20 minutes → 20 seconds

With Rippling AI, answering a state unemployment claim question now requires a single prompt, not an entire research project.

10 hours saved each pay period running payroll

With time cards, time off, and compliance fully integrated, Rippling dramatically reduced the time it takes to run payroll.

Bonus checks employees actually understand

Sales SPIFFs now land in direct deposit alongside regular pay, with full tax visibility in the same pay stub.

Managers looking at time cards

With a system that's easy to use, managers engage with it. Minute-accurate records, geofenced clock-ins, and individually signed policies give the team a defensible paper trail for any challenge.

A custom app that's just the start

The SPIFF tracker was proof of concept. Cruickshank has a running list of workflows to build next.

What’s next for Town Auto Group

For Diane, the SPIFF/Bonus tracker was just the tip of the iceberg for what’s possible with Rippling. Cruickshank has a running list of apps she wants to build. As she turns her attention to growing the business, she's confident she has the right tools in place to scale as they expand their collision center and hire dozens of new service roles across locations.