6 Reasons to Not Use Spreadsheets for Your Loan Origination Pipeline

Managing a loan origination pipeline with a spreadsheet is far superior to having no management system at all. If you’ve done it this way for years, it may even seem like the perfect solution. Still, there are far better ways to effectively and efficiently manage your business using a loan origination system.

With customizable support systems for every loan’s production and fulfillment, a loan origination system allows mortgage lenders to take a transaction from origination to post-closing without the burden of manual spreadsheet management.

Here are the six reasons to start on the path to greater origination efficiency and ease:

1. Purpose-built loan origination software exists that makes managing your applications easier. The best systems will allow for complete flexibility to build a process that aligns with the way you choose to process and manage your business.
   
2. Loan origination systems are built to be shared so that every team member can access it, including processors, underwriters, assistants and more. Even better, that accessibility is facilitated online, so any status changes are visible to all users in real-time. Unlike spreadsheets, there’s never any confusion due to updates not being made automatically. Having a whole team or just you and your assistant in perpetual sync is a game-changer for you and your clients.
   
3. Many minds, many users, many ideas. You may be brilliant, and you may have tweaked your spreadsheet to do everything you want. But what about the few things you may not have thought of that are equally brilliant to your own ideas? With hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of users all constantly proofing and contributing ideas, a commercially available loan origination system may be even more tricked out than your spreadsheet.
   
4. Just as great ideas are conceived and developed, so too might bugs appear. Wouldn’t it be better for an issue to occur on someone else’s deal and to have it fixed before it might ever happen on yours? The cost of losing a single deal — or worse, your reputation — is far greater than the cost of a service contract. The exchange of ideas and ease of troubleshooting on a widely used program will keep you up-to-date and on the cutting edge.
   
5. The best thing about a well-known loan origination system is the volume of users. When you need to hire a new processor or assistant, do you really want to have to train them on your spreadsheet? Wouldn’t it be far easier for your team to be productive from day one because they’ve already been using the same loan origination software and mortgage CRM for years?
   
6. Another valuable feature of modern loan origination systems is compliance monitoring. The best systems will allow managers to assess their team’s compliance with data security regulations and other federal and state laws. For example, your loan estimate and closing disclosure need to match one another to remain compliant. Would you rather waste time staring and comparing numbers on spreadsheets, or use a digital system to generate accurate documents reliably and in just a few clicks?

Busy professionals need a life too. If you value your free time as much as most people, it’ll pay to look into technologies that can make your day easier and help origination teams be more productive.

Whether you’re a mortgage banker, a mortgage broker, a credit union, savings bank or a single loan officer, Black Knights Surefire CRM works with the top loan origination systems to help streamline external and internal communications.

There are so many ways you can complete your work more efficiently. But be warned, by integrating your loan origination systems with the best mortgage CRM, you’ll save time managing your deals. That’ll make your customers happy, leading to more repeat and referral business. In the end, you’ll likely still be very busy, but only because you’re closing even more loans.

Interested? Request a Surefire demo.