Dealer glossary
E-contracting
Signing and transmitting the finance contract electronically instead of on paper.
Definition
Also called electronic contracting, eContracting
E-contracting replaces the printed, wet-signed finance contract with an electronic one, signed on screen and sent to the lender directly.
The reason dealers care is funding speed. An electronic contract can reach the lender the same day, errors are caught before signing rather than after, and there is no courier in the loop.
It depends on the signature actually being verifiable - the certificate and signature checks are what make the contract enforceable rather than merely convenient. A signature image on a PDF is not the same thing as a signed electronic contract, and the difference only becomes visible when someone disputes it.
Not every lender accepts electronic contracts for every product, and some states treat certain documents differently, so most stores end up running both processes for a while. That is normal rather than a failure of the setup.
See how this works in one system.
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