CapRate

Model facility investments and see the five-year payoff clearly.

CapRate is a collaborative ROI planning workspace for dealership facility capital investments. It helps dealership leadership, construction and real estate teams, and strategy owners build a shared, auditable model that ties facility spend to five-year P&L impact, including monthly year-one projections. The product matters because it replaces spreadsheets, email chains, and stale assumptions with a single dynamic artifact that is easier to update, review, and trust.

Business Goals

  • Reduce time to produce a facility ROI business case by 60% within 90 days of launch.
  • Increase completed investment model submissions by 35% within 6 months by making collaboration and approvals easier.
  • Cut revision-cycle time from an average of 5 business days to under 2 business days within 4 months.
  • Achieve 80% weekly active usage among invited collaborators on active projects within 6 months.

User Goals

  • Let dealership leaders build a defensible 5-year P&L projection with a monthly first-year view.
  • Let construction and real estate teams enter facility capital costs and timing in a structured way.
  • Let strategy leads compare scenarios and understand payback, IRR, and margin impact.
  • Let all collaborators see what changed, when it changed, and who changed it.
  • Let teams export a ready-to-present artifact for executive review and approval.

Non-Goals

  • Do not replace a full ERP, accounting system, or budgeting platform.
  • Do not manage contractor bids, invoices, or procurement execution.
  • Do not forecast enterprise-wide finances beyond the facility investment model.
  • Do not automate board approval workflows beyond basic review and sign-off tracking.

Dealership Leader Dana, 48 - Dana owns the business case for a dealership facility project and is responsible for proving the investment will create value. Dana needs fast scenario modeling, a clear monthly year-one view, and confidence that the final package is audit-ready.

Dealership Leader Dana, 48

  • As a dealership leader, I want to project revenue, gross margin, and operating expense impacts over five years, so that I can show the investment case to executives.
  • As a dealership leader, I want to see monthly year-one cash flow and P&L, so that I can understand the near-term payback profile.
  • As a dealership leader, I want to lock a version for review, so that later edits do not invalidate the approved business case.

Construction Manager Carlos, 41 - Carlos manages the facility scope, budget, and readiness requirements needed to get the site to Rush standards. He needs a structured way to enter capital cost assumptions, phasing, and timing without breaking the financial model.

Construction Manager Carlos, 41

  • As a construction manager, I want to enter project costs by category and timing, so that the ROI model reflects the real build plan.
  • As a construction manager, I want to update facility spend assumptions over time, so that the artifact stays current as the project evolves.
  • As a construction manager, I want to see which fields changed since my last update, so that I can quickly review and confirm impacts.

Strategy Lead Sienna, 37 - Sienna coordinates the investment narrative and ensures the numbers support company strategy. She needs scenario comparison, change visibility, and a clean export for leadership review.

Strategy Lead Sienna, 37

  • As a strategy lead, I want to compare base, upside, and downside scenarios, so that I can recommend the best path forward.
  • As a strategy lead, I want to see a change log with comments, so that I can trace assumptions back to contributors.
  • As a strategy lead, I want to export a polished summary packet, so that I can present the case in steering meetings.

Project Setup and Collaboration · High priority

  • Create a shared investment workspace with role-based collaboration, ownership, and version history so multiple teams can contribute without overwriting each other.
  • Support project creation with site, dealer group, and project metadata.
  • Assign collaborators by role: dealership leadership, construction/real estate, strategy, and reviewer.
  • Allow inline comments, field-level ownership, and mention notifications.
  • Maintain immutable version snapshots for submitted milestones and approvals.

P&L and Cash Flow Modeling · High priority

  • Enable dealership leaders to build a five-year post-completion P&L forecast with monthly detail in year one and annual detail thereafter.
  • Include monthly periods for months 1-12 and annual periods for years 2-5.
  • Support configurable revenue, gross margin, OPEX, depreciation, and tax assumption inputs.
  • Calculate payback period, NPV, IRR, EBITDA impact, and cumulative cash flow.
  • Validate that key required inputs are present before publishing a model version.

Facility Capital Cost Input · High priority

  • Allow construction and real estate teams to enter the capital investment plan needed to bring the dealership to Rush standards.
  • Capture cost categories such as sitework, building shell, interiors, equipment, signage, permits, and contingency.
  • Support planned spend timing by month or phase, including pre-opening and post-opening items.
  • Allow attachment of source documents such as bid sheets, drawings, and scope summaries.
  • Flag missing categories or unusually large deltas against prior versions.

Change Tracking and Auditability · High priority

  • Track every assumption, edit, and approval so users can understand how the ROI case evolved over time.
  • Show field-level before-and-after values with timestamp and editor identity.
  • Generate a changelog filtered by collaborator, section, date, and version.
  • Notify relevant users when critical assumptions change beyond configurable thresholds.
  • Preserve locked review versions while allowing draft edits to continue in parallel.

Reporting and Export · Medium priority

  • Produce a presentation-ready artifact and summarized outputs for leadership review, approvals, and downstream use.
  • Export to PDF and Excel with a consistent executive summary, assumptions page, and model appendix.
  • Generate a one-page summary with core metrics, charts, and payback timeline.
  • Support scenario comparison side-by-side.
  • Include branding and site-specific headers for dealer leadership review packages.

Start a New Investment Case

  • Create a project by entering dealership name, site, and target completion date.
  • Invite collaborators and assign responsibility roles in under 2 minutes.
  • Import initial cost assumptions from Excel or start from a blank template.
  • Enter baseline operating assumptions and choose monthly year-one modeling.
  • Review the auto-generated ROI summary and first draft in under 15 minutes.

1. Set up the project

  • The user creates a new facility investment case with basic project metadata and collaborators.
  • Require site name, project owner, and expected go-live date.
  • Allow role-based invites via email with permission templates.
  • Prevent publishing until at least one financial owner and one facility owner are assigned.

2. Enter facility capital plan

  • Construction and real estate users add the project cost structure and timing required for the model.
  • Accept line-item costs by category, month, and phase.
  • Validate that spend totals reconcile to the project total and flag unallocated costs.
  • Support file attachments and source references for each cost line.

3. Build the operating forecast

  • Dealership leadership enters the post-completion P&L assumptions for five years.
  • Use a guided monthly year-one entry flow followed by annual years 2-5.
  • Auto-calculate common derived values such as EBITDA and cumulative cash flow.
  • Warn when assumptions are missing, inconsistent, or outside configured ranges.

4. Review changes and scenarios

  • Users inspect edits, compare versions, and understand the business effect of each assumption change.
  • Provide a diff view by section and field with editor attribution.
  • Allow base, upside, and downside scenario toggles without duplicating the full model.
  • Mark versions as draft, in review, approved, or superseded.

5. Publish and export

  • The team finalizes a version and shares a polished output for leadership decision-making.
  • Export PDF and Excel with locked formulas and visible assumptions.
  • Capture approval status and reviewer comments on the published version.
  • Handle failed exports gracefully with retry and partial progress indicators.

Power User Capabilities

  • Scenario cloning with linked assumptions so users can test changes without starting over.
  • Threshold alerts when facility cost overruns or payback deteriorates beyond set limits.
  • Comment resolution and assignment for decision tracking.
  • Custom assumption libraries for different dealership formats or markets.
  • Historical benchmark comparisons against prior projects or standard facility targets.

Design and Performance Principles

  • Use a spreadsheet-like layout for fast data entry, but keep summary metrics always visible.
  • Highlight edited cells, pending approvals, and invalid values with clear color and icon cues.
  • Support accessible keyboard navigation, screen reader labels, and high-contrast modes.
  • Keep calculations responsive under 300 ms for common edits and show loading states for larger imports.
  • Use sticky section navigation and collapsible panels to reduce cognitive load on long models.

Dana is preparing a facility investment case for a dealership remodel and needs to explain not just the construction budget, but the five-year business impact. In the past, the model lived across multiple spreadsheets, and every stakeholder kept a different version, which made review meetings slow and contentious.

With CapRate, Dana starts a project template, invites Carlos from construction and Sienna from strategy, and they each update their sections in one shared workspace. Dana immediately sees the monthly first-year P&L, change history, and scenario comparisons, so the leadership team can approve a version with confidence and without another round of spreadsheet cleanup.

User-Centric Metrics

  • 80% of active projects have a completed five-year model within 7 days of setup.
  • At least 70% of projects include monthly year-one projections before first review.
  • Reduce average time to resolve open assumption questions to under 48 hours.
  • Achieve a 90% satisfaction score on model clarity and collaboration usefulness.
  • Limit critical formula or reconciliation errors to less than 2% of published versions.

Business Metrics

  • Increase paid project creation conversion to 25% of qualified opportunities within 6 months.
  • Reach 60% 3-month retention among teams that publish at least one model.
  • Grow average projects per account to 3.0 within 12 months.
  • Drive 40% of published cases to include at least one scenario export or review packet.
  • Reduce churn among active accounts by 20% after launch of collaboration features.

Technical Metrics

  • Maintain 99.9% monthly uptime.
  • Keep median interactive recalculation latency under 300 ms and p95 under 1 second.
  • Meet enterprise-grade security with SSO, encryption in transit and at rest, and audit logging.
  • Complete export jobs within 2 minutes for 95% of projects under 500 line items.

Tracking Plan

  • Track project_created with project type, site, and creator role.
  • Track collaborator_invited and collaborator_accepted by role.
  • Track cost_line_added, cost_line_updated, and forecast_value_changed with section and field metadata.
  • Track version_published and version_approved with scenario type and completeness score.
  • Track export_generated for PDF and Excel with file size and completion time.
  • Track comment_added and comment_resolved with time-to-resolution.
  • Track validation_error_shown with error category and affected section.

Technical Needs

  • Frontend built with React and TypeScript for fast, form-heavy interaction.
  • Backend API in Node.js or Python with a calculation service separated from the UI layer.
  • Relational database such as PostgreSQL for projects, versions, assumptions, comments, and audit logs.
  • Job queue such as BullMQ, Sidekiq, or Celery for exports and heavy recalculations.
  • Real-time collaboration via WebSockets or server-sent events for live updates.
  • Formula engine or calculation layer with deterministic versioned outputs.
  • Object storage such as AWS S3 for attachments and generated reports.

Integration Points

  • Microsoft Entra ID or Okta for enterprise SSO.
  • Microsoft Excel import/export for spreadsheet migration and leadership handoff.
  • Google Drive or SharePoint for document attachments and source files.
  • SendGrid or Postmark for notifications and invite emails.
  • Optional BI export to Snowflake or Power BI for downstream reporting.

Data Storage & Privacy

  • Encrypt all data at rest with managed keys and TLS in transit.
  • Store audit trails for edits, comments, exports, and approvals for compliance review.
  • Support tenant-level access controls and role-based permissions to limit sensitive financial visibility.
  • Provide data retention controls and deletion workflows aligned with GDPR and CCPA where applicable.
  • Classify financial assumptions and project attachments as confidential business data and restrict public links.

Scalability & Performance

  • Design calculations to recalculate only affected sections instead of the entire model.
  • Support concurrent editing on active projects with conflict resolution for field-level collisions.
  • Paginate changelog and comments so large projects remain responsive.
  • Cache summary metrics and scenario outputs for fast dashboard rendering.

Potential Challenges

  • Risk: spreadsheet-style complexity can overwhelm users. Mitigation: provide guided templates, defaults, and inline validation with progressive disclosure.
  • Risk: concurrent edits could create conflicting assumptions. Mitigation: use optimistic locking plus field-level diffs and explicit merge prompts.
  • Risk: financial formulas may diverge across versions. Mitigation: centralize calculations in a versioned engine with regression tests and locked formula definitions.
  • Risk: users may distrust ROI outputs if assumptions are unclear. Mitigation: show every metric’s formula inputs, source, and last editor in context.
  • Risk: exports may become slow for large projects. Mitigation: move export generation to background jobs with status tracking and retry logic.

Team & resourcing - Small cross-functional team - 2 full-stack engineers, 1 product designer, part-time PM, and fractional QA.

Phase 1: MVP Workspace and Model · Weeks 1-4

  • Project creation and role-based invitations
  • Facility cost input form with categories and totals
  • Five-year P&L model with monthly year-one support
  • Basic ROI metrics and summary dashboard
  • Manual save, draft, and publish states

Phase 2: Collaboration and Audit Trail · Weeks 5-8

  • Field-level change tracking and version history
  • Comments, mentions, and notifications
  • Scenario cloning for base/upside/downside models
  • Conflict detection for concurrent edits
  • Improved validation and reconciliation warnings

Phase 3: Reporting and Export · Weeks 9-11

  • PDF export and Excel export
  • Executive summary report with charts and assumptions
  • Approval workflow with review status and locked versions
  • Attachment support for source documents
  • Branding and site-specific report headers

Phase 4: Enterprise Readiness · Weeks 12-14

  • SSO integration and permission hardening
  • Audit log review screen and admin controls
  • Performance tuning for large models
  • Analytics instrumentation and KPI dashboard
  • Beta launch support and onboarding templates

Paste this into Cursor, Bolt, Lovable, or v0 to start building.

Build a web app called CapRate for collaborative ROI analysis of dealership facility capital investments.

Product summary:
Dealership leadership must be able to project a five-year post-completion P&L, including monthly detail for year one. Construction and real estate teams must enter projected facility capital investments needed to bring a dealership to Rush standards. Strategy leads need scenario comparison, a change log, comments, approvals, and exportable decision-ready reports.

Core features:
1. Authentication and org setup with role-based access: dealership leader, construction/real estate, strategy lead, reviewer, admin.
2. Project workspace for each facility investment case with metadata: dealership name, site, completion date, status, owners, collaborators.
3. Facility capital input module with line items by category, phase, month, amount, notes, and file attachments.
4. Financial model module with five-year P&L, monthly year-one periods, annual years 2-5, and calculated metrics: payback period, IRR, NPV, EBITDA impact, cumulative cash flow.
5. Real-time collaboration: comments, mentions, field-level change tracking, version history, and locked published versions.
6. Scenario management: base, upside, downside cloning with linked assumptions.
7. Reporting: executive summary dashboard plus export to PDF and Excel.
8. Audit trail: every create, update, publish, approval, and export action logged with user, timestamp, old value, and new value.

Primary screens/flows:
Home dashboard showing active projects, status, and KPIs.
New project wizard.
Project workspace with tabs for Overview, Facility Costs, Financial Model, Change Log, Comments, and Exports.
Scenario compare view.
Approval/publish flow.
Export status modal and history.

Data model:
Organization
User
RoleAssignment
Project
Scenario
FacilityCostLineItem
FinancialAssumption
MonthlyForecastRow
AnnualForecastRow
Comment
ChangeLogEntry
Attachment
Approval
ExportJob
AuditEvent

Requirements:
Use React + TypeScript on the frontend, Node.js backend, PostgreSQL, and Prisma or a similar ORM. Use Tailwind CSS for UI, Zod for validation, React Hook Form for forms, and a job queue such as BullMQ for exports. Use S3-compatible object storage for attachments. Use WebSockets or server-sent events for live updates. Build deterministic calculations in a dedicated service so formulas are testable and versioned.

UX constraints:
Spreadsheet-like data entry with sticky summary metrics, inline validation, autosave, optimistic UI, accessible keyboard navigation, and clear diff highlighting for changed fields. Keep recalculation latency under 300 ms for common edits.

Generate the full app scaffold, database schema, API routes, core components, and sample seed data. Include realistic empty states, error states, loading states, and responsive layouts. Make the design clean, enterprise-friendly, and optimized for long-form financial entry.

Business Idea

I want to create an artifact that effectively and efficiently calculates roi on dealership facilities capital investments. It should include inputs from the dealership leadership, the construction and real estate team and the strategy lead. The dealership lead will be required to project the P&L for the next five years post project completion, including a monthly projection for year one. The construction and real estate team will enter the projected facility construction capital investments in order to be operational to Rush’s stds. This needs to be a dynamic artifact open to updates from each collaborator, with a change tracking mechanism

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