Issue No. 11 | June 16, 2026

Intelligence for F&I agents, administrators, and dealership finance professionals.

THE VEHICLE MARKET NUMBER: 7

Seven lifecycle states. The Dark Sky Data Retention Analysis Tool classifies every account in a dataset as:

• New
• Retained
• Returning
• Lost
• Inactive
• No Longer a Customer
• Not Yet a Customer

Retained accounts are further classified as:

• Retained (Incr)
• Retained (Flat)
• Retained (Decr)

based on volume movement relative to the prior period and a configurable threshold.

The tool was built to make account-level deterioration visible before it shows up in blended volume reporting. Your dealerships are accounts. Each one has a current classification. Few F&I agents measure that distribution systematically.

THE F&I ANGLE

Total monthly contracts submitted is not the same as a healthy book.

An F&I agent with 25 active dealerships sees a monthly submission number. What that number does not show is how many rooftops are writing meaningfully less than 12 months ago, how many have gone from consistent to occasional, and how many are technically in the book but effectively gone. A dealership that dropped from 30 submissions per month to 9 does not disappear from the roster. It simply gets quieter until it stops appearing at all.

Account-level classification makes that movement visible. The dealership at 9 monthly submissions that was at 30 is classified as Retained (Decr). That deterioration shows up in the data before most conversations happen — giving an agent the chance to ask what changed before the volume is already gone.

Two agents can show similar monthly totals with fundamentally different books. One has a stable core of expanding relationships. The other is replacing lost dealerships with new ones at rising effort and cost. Classification makes that distinction measurable.

Two configuration parameters ensure the classification is accurate for a dealership book. The inactivity window determines when a quiet rooftop moves from Inactive to Lost — a dealership dark during a management transition is not the same as one that has moved to a competitor. The minimum activity threshold prevents a single contract from resetting an otherwise-dormant dealership to Retained. Both adjust instantly and recalculate across every rooftop and every period in seconds.

FROM THE BLOG

Retention Analysis Is Live: Customer Persistence Analytics for Private Equity

This week’s post is a full walkthrough of the Retention Analysis Tool: what it classifies, what it computes, and how account-level lifecycle analysis works across a dataset. The underlying idea is simple. Relationship deterioration often becomes visible at the account level before it becomes obvious in blended volume reporting, whether the accounts are customers in a portfolio company or dealerships in an F&I book.

THE DESK STAT

Pick three dealerships in your book that are submitting less now than 18 months ago. Are they Retained (Decr), going Inactive, or already Lost in everything but name? The answer tells you whether the next conversation should be about recovery, reactivation, or replacement.

Until next Tuesday,

Reply here and tell me how many dealerships in your book you would classify as Retained (Decr) or Inactive right now. If you’d like to see how this type of analysis applies to an agent book, we can walk through it in 20 minutes.