For any rapidly growing lender, using an accounting software equipped to keep up with the pace of industry trends and new technology is essential for continuous growth and survival in the market.
Village Mortgage, a well-established lender providing residential mortgages across all of the New England states, Florida, Nevada and Colorado began to experience the struggles of outgrowing its accounting software, after they experienced rapid growth from 2012 through 2015.
“Our previous system wasn’t at all specific to the mortgage banking industry, which really limited what we could accomplish,” said Justin Girolimon, Senior Vice President & CFO at Village Mortgage. “We wanted to automate commissions and recording funded loans and purchased loans, and even utilize a branch portal where managers can see exactly how their branches are performing. We didn’t have any of that with our old system.”
Justin and his team felt it was essential they not only find a solution that worked for their industry, but one that contained all the standard financial management and accounting functionality they needed to support the business as it continued to grow and scale.
“Daily tasks like recording deposits, paying vendors, and recording journal entries were all very manual processes, and when you’re doing that for over 200 loans every month, we reached the point where we would have to hire at least one other person in the accounting department.”
Faced with the potential reality of settling for their current system and hiring even more employees to the accounting department, the team instead began the hunt for a new accounting solution to tackle the day to day tasks fraught with manual labor.
“Do we keep the system we have that includes a ton of manual processes and hire more employees in accounting, or do we look for a way to streamline it?”
As his team browsed the market, Girolimon said that one solution stood out as the most polished among the other options they viewed.
“Loan Vision was the answer at the end of the day. The fact that we could automatically import the loans that are funded and purchased and vendor payables so we could have recurring monthly invoices automatically come up has freed up both of the individuals we have in the accounting department tremendously. Everything was housed within the system, there weren’t any add-on modules, and its Microsoft interface was very familiar for us.”
For Girolimon, transitioning to Loan Vision was one of the easiest conversions the team had ever experienced. The reporting capabilities housed within Loan Vision had bridged the gap left behind by the old software and finally gave his team the functionality they desired.
“With Loan Vision, we can easily run a P&L report on any particular branch. Overall, we’re able to drill down into multiple layers of data that weren’t as easily accessible before, and when we looked at what Loan Vision competitors had to offer, all of it just didn’t seem easy at all.”
Trusting their accounting processes to Loan Vision has not only allowed the Village Mortgage team to dive deeper into their data, but has also cut the amount of time spent doing it all.
“We’re reconciling our accounts every single day because it’s so easy in Loan Vision. With our old system, we issued our financials quarterly, and now we’re issuing them monthly, which has completely taken our warehouse lenders and investors by surprise.”
Using Loan Vision in conjunction with other business intelligence and forecasting tools, such as Alight and Motivity, the team now plans efficiently and accurately.
“With all of these tools interfacing with one another, it’s much easier for us to manage and forecast the future now, instead of manually running projections. We’re able to make decisions more quickly, our profitability has jumped tremendously, and for the past three months, we’ve had our financials closed out completely and issued within 3 business days.”
Prior to implementing Loan Vision, the Village Mortgage team had previously undergone other system implementations that could be classified as “difficult”. As for Loan Vision, a clearly defined implementation process was provided.
“We’ve changed systems many times and I’ve never been through an implementation that has been as structured as Loan Vision. Our team knew exactly where we stood throughout the entire process.”
Reflecting on the process, Girolimon was impressed by the full implementation timeline established by the software team before the project had even began, providing clear direction and deadlines for the smoothest transition possible. Ultimately, the team felt so comfortable with their new system they opted out of running dual systems and went straight into using Loan Vision on January 1st, 2016.
“We’d considered running dual systems for a month as we made the conversion, but later determined that wasn’t even necessary. The support team exceeded our expectations back then and to this day they are quick, responsive, and know the industry. They’re not just on the IT side, they actually understand what we do, which is invaluable.”
It has been two years since Village Mortgage implemented Loan Vision. The company has grown substantially and continues to credit their improved decision making processes to making the software switch.
“We’re able to operate quicker, leaner, and a lot of our success this year has shown now after being on Loan Vision for a full year. We wouldn’t have been able to do any of these things before, since we didn’t have these tools readily available to us. Loan Vision has helped us make that next step, and we’re reconciling our accounts every single day because it’s so easy with this system.”
“When I began with the company in 2004, there were 10 employees. Today, we have over 130 employees and we focus on long term sustainability through quality loans and doing the right thing. Loan Vision has helped us to make careful, educated decisions rather than trying to guess the future.”
