Tech
As an owner or a leader of a mortgage bank, when you invest in a system, you expect it to last. Quality software should be useful for many years, so it may be hard to determine whether or not it’s actually time for a change. Replacing, in particular, your business’s general ledger every few years can be extremely time-consuming and costly. Which is why finding the right solution that grows, changes, and evolves with you is so important.
So, how are you supposed to know if it’s time for a replacement? Here are 4 key signs that it’s time for you to upgrade your accounting software.
Your current software is hard to use and requires many steps to complete even simple tasks. Because of this, you’re seeing inefficiency within the system and your team. Whether you can’t easily connect remotely, importing data can’t be effortlessly automated, you have high exposure to cybersecurity risk, or you’re constantly needing IT support, you’re burning valuable time and internal resources unnecessarily.
Congrats! Your business is growing….so much that your current software can’t keep up. The goals of your company are not being met because the system you’ve invested time and money into is not capable of supporting your new business needs. Your accounting team is focused purely on getting the books done, while everything else is falling by the wayside. (BTW…this happened a lot during the recent refi wave brought about by the pandemic!)
Your current G/L lacks drill down capabilities, requires you to dump everything out to spreadsheets, or isn’t able to easily slice and dice. Because of these barriers, the software is not producing the data you need, or, worse off, it’s producing the wrong data. Timely decision making is not occurring because your software cannot produce enough or cannot produce accurate information easily. Sure, you can put extra checks and balances in place to ensure data accuracy, but this is just another step in producing timely information on which you can make decisions.
If you have older, or even inadequate, software, it’s likely that integration is not high on its list of skills. With integration of different technologies, your company, systems, and data can give your employees what they need, when they need it, wherever they need it. Without your software playing nicely with others, you may find that your team is spending a longer period of time on tasks that shouldn’t need it or that you’re lacking the tools to deep dive into certain areas of your business.
Now that we’ve touched on if you need to replace your old software, let’s focus on why you should. Technology never stops evolving! In our current times, that evolution is happening at an accelerating rate. According to Forbes, from 1998 to 2017, the shelf life of web-enabled services requiring an update dropped from 3-5 years to 6 months. The modernization of software is rapidly pushing out basic systems, and here are 3 reasons why.
When investing in a system that is not only built to last, but also built to change with you and your business, you’re gaining reliability in your technology. The right software should scale and evolve as your business does, integrate well with supporting technologies, and easily support the ever-evolving way your people work, whether that be in the office or remotely.
Technology leaders want to manage vendors, not hardware, so SaaS and its many benefits (Enhanced Security, Scalability, etc.) are here to stay.
From experience, if many mortgage banks were to really look at what their highly educated, extremely competent, and hard-working accounting team were working on every day, they would be shocked. So many mortgage accounting departments spend way too much time on “just getting the books done.”
With the right tools, accountants should spend their time reviewing and analyzing, not living in Excel and doing data entry. While replacing your software may seem expensive, it often pays for itself in the long run, especially when it’s allowing greater operational efficiencies for your company, while also removing a number of IT costs, such as servers, software licensing, and much more.
Remember the days of the old paper maps and road atlases? For me, this is a great example of how technology (first Mapquest, then TomTom, and now phone apps) allows us to make better, faster, and more accurate decisions. Our G/L should help us do this with our financial data!
Real-time access to every aspect of your financial information may feel like an unattainable dream when you’re operating on a system that can’t provide it. But, when you invest in a software that’s built with industry reporting out-of-the-box, like Loan Vision’s cloud-based platform, Loan Vision 365 (apologies for the shameless plug), you’re well on your way to getting a clearer path to consistent and increased profitability, simply because the information is much easier to find, analyze, and digest. Oh, and you don’t have to fold the thing up when you’re done!
If you’re still stuck on whether or not to replace your system, see the checklist below. If you answer yes to one or more of these, it may be time for you to make the move.
As the Director of Sales & Marketing at Loan Vision, Carl Wooloff’s responsibilities include new business, overseeing marketing efforts, and working with existing customers. What Carl loves most about Loan Vision is being part of a successful, well loved company and the relationships we forge with our customers. When Carl is not at Loan Vision, he enjoys spending time with his very tolerant wife and 3 wonderful children, cooking, and sports.
.png)
