Walk into the service department of any Dealertrack DMS dealership and you'll find stacks of printed Repair Orders, Tech Hard Cards, and warranty documents. The parts counter has Purchase Orders and Picking Tickets. Accounting has Statements and receipts. Sales has buyer's orders and deal jackets.
None of this is because dealership staff prefer paper. It's because Dealertrack DMS was built in an era when physical printers were the only output option — and many of its forms still require printing to get the complete document with logos and formatting.
The Print-Scan-Email Cycle
The most common reason dealerships print is to send documents electronically. A customer calls and needs a copy of their receipt. A vendor needs a Statement of Account. A warranty company needs a Repair Order.
The workflow looks like this: the staff member prints the document to get the logos and formatting right, walks to the printer, picks it up, walks to the scanner, scans it back in, emails the scan to themselves, then forwards it to the customer or vendor. This process takes 3–5 minutes per document and happens dozens of times per day across a typical dealership.
Why Not Just Use QPRINT?
Dealertrack offers a built-in option called QPRINT that can output documents without a physical printer. The problem is that QPRINT produces text-only output — no logos, no formatting, no branding. For internal reference, that might be acceptable. But for customer-facing documents like Repair Orders, Invoices, or Statements, sending a plain-text version looks unprofessional and can cause confusion.
Most dealerships need their documents to look exactly like they would on letterhead — with the dealership logo, proper formatting, and professional layout. QPRINT simply can't deliver that.
What Does All This Printing Actually Cost?
The costs add up faster than most dealerships realize:
- Printer hardware:Commercial Lexmark printers cost $500–$2,000+ each, and most dealerships have 5–30 of them spread across departments.
- Toner and paper: A high-volume dealership can spend well over $6,000/month on toner cartridges, paper, and printing-related costs across all their printers.
- Maintenance contracts:Printer service agreements run $50–$200/month per device, plus emergency repair calls.
- Employee time:At 3–5 minutes per print-scan-email cycle, a dealership doing this 30+ times per day loses 2–3 hours of productive staff time daily.
- Shredding services:Printed documents containing customer information must be properly shredded, adding another $50–$150/month.
For a single-rooftop dealership, total printing costs can easily exceed $6,000 per month when you factor in hardware amortization, consumables, maintenance, labor, and disposal.
The Batch Printing Problem
There's another hidden cost that rarely gets discussed: batch printing. In Dealertrack, many print jobs output as a batch — sometimes dozens or even hundreds of pages at once. But often, you only need one specific page from that entire batch. With physical printers, there's no way around it: you print the whole job, sift through the stack, pull the one page you need, and throw away (or shred) the rest.
With a virtual printer like PrintSent, every print job is delivered as a PDF. You can scroll to the exact page you need and print just that one page to any nearby printer — or simply forward the PDF digitally. No more printing hundreds of pages just to get the one you actually want.
The Path Forward
The good news is that this doesn't have to be the reality anymore. Solutions like PrintSent work as a virtual printer for Dealertrack — capturing print jobs with full logos and formatting and delivering them as pixel-perfect PDFs to email. Staff still send print jobs to a printer like normal — they just pick a PrintSent printer. Instead of paper, a branded PDF arrives in the right inbox within seconds.
The print-scan-email cycle disappears. Hardware costs drop. Staff time is recovered. And every document looks exactly as professional as it would on paper — because it's the same output, just delivered digitally.