Rapid change in any company can lead to challenges, but when the change is caused by accelerated growth, management generally considers those challenges to be good problems to have. Still, when Success Mortgage Partners changed auditing firms in 2015, their advisor recommended that they upgrade their accounting software.
“We realized that our current accounting tool just wasn’t sufficient to produce the reports we needed,” said Basia Nowakowski, Director of Accounting for Success Mortgage. “We are growing quite rapidly and so we needed something that would give us loan-level accounting functionality.”
Nowakowski said Success had doubled in size during each of the past three years. The company recently announced its expansion from its Michigan base into Alabama, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Wisconsin, and Wyoming. The firm has hired over 120 talented loan officers and employees this year alone and now employs 600 people.
“Our biggest frustration with our legacy system was that every single thing we did had to be done manually, every reconciliation, every expense. We maintained hundreds of Excel spreadsheets,” she said. “With the volume that we have, we really needed a tool that provided much more functionality than what we were working with here in the accounting department.”
Success Mortgage had to make a decision. Did the company hire a score of additional accountants and continue to do the work manually or invest in a more sophisticated software platform to meet the company’s changing needs.
THE SOLUTION
Nowakowski and her team began polling contacts around the industry, seeking information that could lead the company to a better solution.
“We were referred to a couple of companies that we vetted,” she said. “Loan Vision seemed to fit our needs the best.”
In addition, there were a number of features and benefits Loan Vision offered that Nowakowski found very attractive, including:
Loan Level Accounting: “First and foremost, they were able to handle loan level accounting with minimal touches from our team [no need to create spreadsheet workarounds]. That really appealed to us.”
Web Based Branch & Executive Reporting: “With both a real time and non-real time version, this really appealed to us because we have about twenty nine branches in fifteen different states at the moment.”
Commission Calculations: “We were doing all of that manually and knowing that we could program Loan Vision to handle that for us with much more accuracy and efficiency, really piqued our interest.”
Integration Capabilities: We’ve been working with Concur for the past year and we really like their services. Knowing that Loan Vision integrated with Concur, we knew we could be very efficient on that front as well.”
Ease of Use: “Most of us are very familiar with Microsoft Office products, so having a view into our accounting software that feels like Microsoft Office as really appealing to me and my team. Knowing that it’s Microsoft-based really gave us a comfort level, since everything else is brand new for us.”
With so much to offer, Loan Vision was the easy choice for Success Mortgage Partners, but it would still have to be implemented across the enterprise. Nowakowski has the experience to know that the setup process can be very painful with the wrong partner.
“I personally went through four new software implementations last year, of which one was Loan Vision,” Nowakowski said. “Loan Vision was definitely the easiest.”
She offered an example: because Success Mortgage had opted to go with the full Loan Vision package -- including the branch module and the commission’s functionality -- and with end of year and audit work piling up, Nowakowski feared that they would not get the software implemented in time to hit her roll out dates.
“Bestborn stepped in and offered to help us build out those pieces so we could meet our deadlines,” Nowakowski recalls. “That was exceptional to me. They wanted us to succeed, to provide a tool that our employees could use, especially the branches. They were able to facilitate the process and help us get that done.”
Together, Success Mortgage and Bestborn Business Solutions implemented the Loan Vision accounting software enterprise wide by deadline.
“The level of support that we have received on the sales side from Carl and Martin as well as the implementation team, has been amazing,” she said. “They have been absolutely fantastic and the way they structure their implementation process has made it so easy. It’s just been a fantastic experience since we’ve signed with them.”
“Switching to Loan Vision has been a huge plus for us,” Nowakowski said. “Going from our legacy system to Loan Vision is like going from night to day!”
While the company still uses Excel for some purposes, Loan Vision makes it easy by populating the sheets automatically.
“All we have to do is manipulate the data,” Nowakowski said. “This has been a huge time savings for us.”
But it’s not just time savings Success Mortgage has received.
“With Loan Vision’s ability to import data into the system automatically through its integrations, we’ve been seeing much higher accuracy levels. Plus, because we can see everything on such a granular level that we’re able to drill down to almost any expense or revenue piece, anything! This has been extremely beneficial to our business,” she said.
“The biggest area in which we have seen new efficiencies has been in the loan processing area,” Nowakowski said. “Typically, with the loan volume we see at Success Mortgage Partners, it could take a person up to three days to process it all manually. Today, we’re able to do it in about 4 hours!”
Nowakowski said her firm’s decision to implement Loan Vision was not necessarily about running her department with fewer people.
“We still don’t have a lot of free time, but with Loan Vision I’ve been able to retask my staff into more of an auditing role so we can ensure the accuracy of all of the information going into the system and all of the reports coming out of the system. So, it’s a huge shift that has given us the ability to have better control.”
Nowakowski knows that there is still power within Loan Vision that her team is not yet experienced enough to tap, but she’s looking forward to that challenge.
“I am eager to see what more we can do with Loan Vision in the year to come. We want to improve everything that we do accounting-related for the company.”
