An Audi store carries a stack of factory-written pay terms: a sponsored apprentice with a contractual wage floor and a two-year retention promise, a technician ladder that tops out at Master Guild, three high-voltage levels that decide who may touch an e-tron, a Twin Cup team whose recognition money lands on two different pay plans, and an EV floor so lease-built it ships its own reconditioning work back three years later. WageTime runs all of it as configured payroll: effective-dated rates, credential gates, bonus runs, imported flag hours. One store or the whole group, one Friday.
WageTime serves independently owned and operated dealerships. WageTime is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Audi of America, AUDI AG, or the Volkswagen Group. All trademarks belong to their respective owners.
An Audi store’s payroll problems aren’t generic dealership problems with four rings on top. They come from a factory that writes wage terms into its programs, a service career ladder with money on every rung, and a sales floor whose deal structure the lease desk decided years ago. Each one is either office hours nobody bills or a promise quietly drifting out of compliance.
Sponsor an apprentice through the Audi Education Partnership and the dealer signs for real terms: a wage floor for bay time, an assigned mentor, eight weeks of Audi Academy training inside an 18-month clock, and a certified technician the store keeps for two years. Today those terms live in a folder, and payroll keeps them from memory.
Specialist, Expert, Master, Master Guild: every rung moves the flat-rate figure. A tech passes the last course on a Tuesday and the office hears about it after the period closes, so the new rate arrives as a retro adjustment and a hallway apology.
The team that wins is a technician and a service advisor together. One is paid on flag hours, the other on labor gross. The store’s recognition check has to reach both correctly, off the pay calendar, with taxes handled, and today that means the office improvises.
Chasing Magna Society turns customer-experience metrics into money for advisors, Brand Specialists, and the BDC, each on a different underlying plan, each paid when scores post rather than when the calendar says. The all-departments bonus sheet only the GM understands is a pay run wearing a costume.
A lease-built EV floor guarantees the service drive a scheduled wave of return inspections and reconditioning flags, much of it gated to high-voltage-certified hands. Those hours pay at their own rates, and they reach payroll today the same way everything else does: re-keyed.
Audi showrooms staff Brand Specialists on salary-or-hourly-plus-commission hybrids while the used floor often runs classic percentage-of-gross. Two comp philosophies, one month-end close, and a down-market year where minis and volume money do most of the earning.
Five of these become real product screens below, with sample store data. The desk math gets straight answers in the FAQ.
WageTime turns the sponsorship agreement into configured pay rules instead of office memory. The apprentice’s bay-time wage runs as an hourly rate set above the program’s floor, the mentor’s premium is its own pay code on the mentor’s check, and the week the apprentice starts flagging real hours beside hourly training time, overtime computes on the weighted-average regular rate automatically. The flip matters most: when the certification date lands, the pay basis changes from hourly to flat rate on that effective date, scheduled in advance, not discovered at the next close. Two years of retention promise becomes two years of clean, documented wage history you can show anyone who asks.
| Person | Program month | Basis | Rule | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| T. Willems (apprentice) | 16 of 18 | Hourly $19.50 | Flips to $26.00/flag hr on Aug 24 | Flip scheduled |
| J. Okonkwo (apprentice) | 7 of 18 | Hourly $17.00 | Set above the $15.00 program floor | Clear |
| R. Stavros (mentor) | Flat rate $38.50 | +$150.00/period mentor premium | Paying | |
| L. Fontaine (apprentice) | 2 of 18 | Hourly $16.00 | Mixed hourly + flag: weighted-average OT | Clear |
Replaces the folder where the AEP agreement lives, and the payroll surprise on graduation day.
WageTime binds each technician’s flat-rate figure to the credential that earned it, with an effective date, so the rate moves the day the rung does. Audi’s ladder climbs Specialist to Expert to Master to Master Guild, and alongside it sit the certifications that expire: ASE credentials on their five-year cycle and the high-voltage levels that decide who may work on an e-tron at all. Every credential lives on the employee record with recurring 30, 60, and 90-day expiration alerts, so a lapse shows up as a warning with a dollar figure attached, not as a retro adjustment three checks later. When a tech levels up mid-period, the old rate and the new rate each apply to their own days.
| Tech | Rung | HV level | Rate rule | Watching |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| M. Castile #02 | Master Guild | Level 3 | $46.00/flag hr | ASE recert Mar 2027 |
| A. Brandt #06 | Master | Level 2 | $39.00/flag hr | L1 expires Sep 12 · drops to $35.00 |
| S. Iyer #09 | Expert | Level 2 | $31.50/flag hr | $36.00 queued for Aug 1 |
| D. Marsh #14 | Specialist | Level 1 | $24.00/flag hr | Two courses to Expert |
Replaces the whiteboard ladder, and the retro check that follows a quiet recert lapse.
WageTime pays recognition money as its own bonus run, so one award can land on two different pay plans correctly. Audi’s Twin Cup scores technicians and service advisors as a team, which means the store’s celebration check reaches one person paid on flag hours and another paid on labor gross. In WageTime that’s a bonus earning code on an off-cycle run: each recipient keeps their normal plan untouched, withholding is handled on the run like any other wages, and because payroll runs are unlimited, the off-cycle celebration costs nothing extra. When the store adds a runner-up spiff or a parts-counter thank-you the same week, the same run carries those too, each as its own earning line.
| Person | Role | Regular plan | Award | Net effect |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| A. Brandt #06 | Technician | $39.00/flag hr | $1,500.00 | Separate line, plan unchanged |
| N. Duval | Service advisor | Base + labor-gross comm | $1,500.00 | Separate line, plan unchanged |
| S. Iyer #09 | Technician (runner-up) | $31.50/flag hr | $500.00 | Separate line |
| K. Aldana | Advisor (runner-up) | Base + labor-gross comm | $500.00 | Separate line |
Replaces the envelope math, and the argument about whose pay plan the team money belongs to.
WageTime pays a store-wide program department by department, because that’s how the money actually splits. Magna Society is scored at the store level, on customer-experience metrics plus business standards, but the bonuses it inspires land on people: advisors on one plan, Brand Specialists on another, the BDC hourly. Department-level controls keep each pool with its own approver, bonus codes carry the payout without disturbing anyone’s underlying comp, and role-based access means the service manager sees the drive’s pool and not the showroom’s. When scores post mid-cycle, the payout rides an off-cycle run at no extra cost, and reporting comes per department or combined, so the GM sees the push as one number and the controller sees it as forty correct ones.
| Department | People | Pool | Approved by | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Service drive | 11 | $5,500.00 | R. Whitfield | Ready |
| Sales floor | 9 | $4,500.00 | D. Camara | Ready |
| Parts counter | 5 | $1,750.00 | L. Bright | Ready |
| BDC | 4 | $1,200.00 | Holds only its own pool | Pending approval |
Replaces the all-departments bonus spreadsheet that only the GM understands.
WageTime imports the recon lane’s hours with everything else, split into their own bucket at their own rate. 94% of Audi’s U.S. electric vehicles leave the store on a lease, which hands the service drive a scheduled wave of lease-return inspections and certified pre-owned reconditioning three years later, and much of that work may only be flagged by a tech whose high-voltage level covers it. We import clock and flag hours so there’s no double entry: recon flags land beside warranty and customer-pay time, each bucket at its own rate, matched to the pay period and tied to the tickets they came from. The HV credential sits on the employee record, so the premium follows the certification, not the guess. Tell us your DMS on the demo and we’ll confirm the exact flow for your setup.
| Tech | HV level | Recon flag | Warranty flag | CP flag | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| M. Castile #02 | Level 3 | 14.6 | 18.2 | 30.4 | Ready |
| A. Brandt #06 | Level 2 | 11.2 | 22.8 | 26.9 | Ready |
| S. Iyer #09 | Level 2 | 9.8 | 16.4 | 31.7 | Ready |
| D. Marsh #14 | Level 1 | 3.5 (non-HV only) | 12.1 | 24.3 | 1 ticket open |
Replaces the recon hours penciled onto the used-car manager’s clipboard.
The base runs as salary or hourly on the regular cycle, and the month-end commission close computes the rest: gross commissions, unit minis, volume tiers, and F&I with chargeback netting, with draw offsets applied against a running ledger. In a year like 2025, when Audi of America sold 164,942 vehicles, 16% fewer than the year before, minis and volume money carry more of the check.
That structure is WageTime’s default shape. The Audi LLC, the VW LLC, and the used-car company each keep their own EIN, and every federal, state, and local filing runs per company with deposits included. The office signs in once, approves the group’s Friday in one sitting, and pulls reports per rooftop or rolled together, with no consolidation workbook in between.
We import clock and flag hours so there’s no double entry. Closed-ticket flag time and time-clock hours land in one review screen, split warranty, customer-pay, and recon, matched to the pay period. Whether the store runs CDK, Reynolds & Reynolds, Dealertrack, or Tekion beside ElsaPro and ODIS, nobody re-keys the paying numbers. Tell us your DMS on the demo and we’ll confirm the exact flow for your setup.
Yes, and the four-ring drive earns them: factory labor allowances price warranty work leaner than customer-pay guide times, so a stretch of warranty-heavy e-tron and recall tickets can pull a flat-rate paycheck toward the statutory floor. WageTime runs the effective-rate math on every tech every period and puts any make-up pay on the run as its own documented earning.
Audi defines three high-voltage technician levels, from no live-part contact up to work on energized systems. In WageTime each tech’s HV level is a credential on the employee record with expiration alerts, its rate premium binds to that credential with an effective date, and a lapsed certification ends the premium on the day it lapses, not three checks later.
$50 per month per company plus $8 per month per person paid that month, no contracts, cancel anytime. A 54-person Audi store runs $482 for the month: $50 base plus $432 in per-person fees. Payroll runs are unlimited, so Twin Cup recognition runs and mid-cycle bonus payouts cost nothing extra, and year-end W-2s and 1099s are included, with 1099 contractors running alongside W-2 employees.
The AEP agreement, the Guild whiteboard, last month’s commission board, a fortnight of recon flags off the lease returns. Twenty minutes with a payroll specialist against a live demo store: if WageTime can’t keep the brand’s pay terms for you, you’ll know before the call ends.
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