SOUTH BEND, Ind. -

Celebrating its 50th year in the consumer lending market, Carleton looked to enhance its suite of solutions this week.

Following extensive market feedback and discussions with key partners, Carleton released CarCalcs, a comprehensive and integrated sales tax, registration and dealer fee application programming interface (API) to complement its CarletonCalcs solution. 

The company reiterated CarCalcs was designed to be an easy and flexible integration for any platform provider in order to connect and populate dealer administration settings. The application’s ease of use is designed to allow for the seamless onboarding of a dealer and real-time access to registration and dealer fee values. The data returned from the API is delivered in a format easily consumed by the CarletonCalcs payment computation module for the precise calculation of retail sales or leases. 

These computations can provide the following:

• Sales tax rates by state, city and county                                                                                                             

• Sales tax basis including settings for fees and down payments

• Registration fee based on vehicle information                                                

• Dealer fee default amounts by state, including documentation fees                                     

• Finance company and DMS default computation settings

• Ability to compute payment and deal information in a single call

The CarCalcs sales tax and dealer fee API integrates with the title and registration product from Automotive Titling Corp. (ATC) to generate a comprehensive single data channel delivery service.  ATC provides automotive sales tax and registration fees in all 50 states. 

“For over two decades, ATC has processed thousands of transactions through DMVs all over the country. This has facilitated our ability to build, catalog and uniquely authenticate the most accurate sales tax and registration fee database in the industry,” ATC president Ken Alley said. “Our authentication process is a full-time focus of our expert team”.

The moves were made in light of the vehicle-buying process shifting to a consumer-driven digital marketplace. As a result, Carleton stressed that dealers and finance companies now need their digital retailing platform to support lending regulations nationwide. 

Company leadership insisted the combination of Carleton’s loan and lease payment calculation engine, Carleton’s compliant state-driven dealer fee data base, and ATC’s sales tax and title registration data, has resulted in a comprehensive and accurate payment solution.   

“We saw a critical need for additional components to calculate accurate payment computations. This was the impetus for developing CarCalcs. Through our partnership with ATC, we have expanded our calculation offerings to include sales tax and registration fees,” Carleton Matt Ruszkowski president and chief operating officer said.

“We knew we needed a partner with the same level of expertise as our proven calculation services. Partnering with ATC was a logical decision,” Ruszkowski added.