Embrace Home Loans operates 28 branches and originates roughly $2.4 billion across approximately 5,500 loans a year, supported by an eight-person accounting team. For more than two decades, that team ran on Great Plains, a general accounting system never designed for a mortgage lender.
“It’s just a basic accounting system. There was no field for loan number. Nothing was built for a mortgage company.”
— Tim Davin, Controller, Embrace Home Loans
Because Great Plains couldn’t accommodate mortgage-specific data, much of Embrace’s real accounting work happened outside the system entirely, in Empower, the company’s production platform, and in Excel. That meant maintaining two separate sets of numbers: what hit the general ledger, and what the legacy reports showed.
“We would spend weeks trying to get those two reports to balance.”
— Tim Davin
With only a single field available for reference data, the team was forced to concatenate vendor names, loan numbers, and transaction reasons together. “Anything we could fit in that one field, we would cram it in there,” says Davin.
Nothing about the system was efficient. Custom-built checks made check runs difficult to manage, and reporting was so limited that Embrace had to license a separate reporting tool just to compensate.
“None of it was streamlined. It was a system built on workarounds.”
— Tim Davin
Missing loan numbers made errors nearly impossible to trace. If an entry was booked without one, tying it back to a specific loan meant waiting on someone else’s reconciliation, or simply guessing.
“You’d have to be a detective to follow it all through and decipher who did what.”
— Tim Davin
The consequences showed up at every month-end. Reporting was due to Embrace’s banks by the 30th, and the close routinely stretched 20 to 30 calendar days, sometimes consuming nearly every day of the month. Even after posting preliminary year-end numbers by mid-February, late entries kept coming as the team continued reconciling.
“Some months, it took us all 30 days.”
— Tim Davin
As loan volume grew, Embrace needed a system built specifically for mortgage accounting, not one it had to keep working around.
Embrace was introduced to Loan Vision through Advisent (formerly CWDL), and the recommendation carried extra weight once the company’s audit firm, Richey May, endorsed the platform as well. After evaluating several alternatives, Loan Vision emerged as the clear choice.
One competitor in particular gave Davin pause. “It just felt like an older system. It kind of looked like our reporting, which scared me,” he says. Loan Vision stood apart during demos for how actively it was evolving.
“You could tell the product was always advancing. You could see it in the screens, the drill-throughs, and how everything worked together. It was much more interactive than the antiquated system we were used to.”
— Tim Davin
For Brian Gilpin, CFO at Embrace Home Loans, the deciding factors went beyond the interface. “Could we get the data we needed? Would the support be there? Would they continue to grow and enhance the product?” he says. “It’s one thing to build a system, but you’ve got to keep up with how things change and customer needs.”
Once the decision was made, Embrace brought in two consultants to help manage the move. The heaviest lift wasn’t Loan Vision itself, it was untangling more than 20 years of internally built reports, custom code, and legacy data across Embrace’s loan card, disbursement, and sale-and-settle files.
“We spent six months cleaning up the data. We had 20-plus years of reporting that we were having to work through.”
— Tim Davin
Throughout implementation, Loan Vision specialists worked directly with Embrace’s team to configure the system around key functions like accounts payable, while ensuring each decision supported the company’s long-term reporting needs.
“We anticipated it might take an extra month, but it ended up moving faster than expected. I was impressed. The stress was pretty minimal. People had to adjust to the change, but once they got into it, they welcomed it.”
— Brian Gilpin, Chief Financial Officer, Embrace Home Loans
Since implementing Loan Vision, Embrace Home Loans has closes faster, runs a more efficient accounting team, and gained visibility down to the individual loan.
Month-end close once stretched 20 to 30 calendar days. Today, Embrace targets the 10th of the month and typically closes by the 15th, with its most recent close completed in just 13 days.
The best part about it is that the team gets there without cutting corners. Rather than closing early on the prior month’s servicing data, as some lenders do, Embrace reports everything within the same month and still finishes in a fraction of the time it once took.
“It’s more than cut our time in half.”
— Tim Davin
The detective work is gone, too. “Now, you just click a button and everything you want to know about a loan is right in front of you,” says Davin. Instead of spending the month ticking and tying one report against another, the team can watch the loan balances themselves, catching what needs attention rather than just proving the books agree.
With Loan Vision, Embrace’s trial balance is the general ledger, creating a single set of books that also drives the company’s performance model P&Ls. The team can pull a P&L by loan officer, product, state, or escrow account in moments.
“Our ability to drill down to the lowest level has made us better. We were in an executive team meeting looking at a certain loan fee category, and we could drill all the way down to individual loan officers, branches, and regions. We were able to get real answers about where we might need to make changes and where we could cut costs to improve our bottom line.”
— Brian Gilpin
The finance team has felt the difference, too. “The reporting is much more timely and much more exact. There probably isn’t a question I have that I can’t get an answer to,” Gilpin says.
In the past, the company would have needed to aggressively backfill positions as roles opened up. With the efficiencies that Loan Vision was able to bring to the table, the team has been able to operate more efficiently with fewer people. Over the course of using Loan Vision, the accounting team went from a peak of 13 people down to about seven and a half over three years, without losing pace.
“Loan Vision has helped us do more with fewer people.”
— Tim Davin
For Davin, the difference goes beyond the software itself.
“It’s refreshing to see the passion to innovate and keep making us better as a client and user of the platform. I feel like it’s more of a partnership than just using a piece of software.”
— Tim Davin
Asked to sum up the switch in a single word, the two leaders didn’t hesitate. For Davin, it was efficiency. For Gilpin, timeliness — two words that, between them, tell the whole story.
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