Easing the Transition to a New Loan Management Platform

You’re a lender.  Maybe a full-fledged lender where you actually provide money to your borrowers, or maybe in part where you finance the transactions for your business.  But you have debtors that owe you money that you need to track and collect.

You probably already have a system you’ve been using for years, but you’ve outgrown its capabilities.  Maybe it’s just a big, gnarly Excel spreadsheet, or an aging custom system, or you're just tired of the cost .  You find yourself spending more and more time to create letters or massaging the data it spits out into usable financials.  You know the numbers it gives you and how it works, so you feel comfortable with it, but the capabilities that are missing are a frustrating roadblock.  Managing your financing operations is becoming too painful to continue.  You must find a permanent solution to this problem if you’re going to remain in business and increase the number of loans you’re managing.

So now you’re searching the web and looking for the perfect new loan servicing system.  At this point, you have to make one very big decision – will you continue to manage the loans yourself, or do you want to just hand the whole thing to someone else and pay them to manage it all for you.  If you offload the whole process, you’re looking for a good loan servicer – a company that services the debt, takes a cut and sends you the proceeds.

But if you’re like me and all the folks already using Moneylender Professional, you want to keep the loan servicing in-house.  You see the value in investing a handful of your time to ensure your customers are being treated properly as their debt is repaid.  You want the authority to resolve situations with a customer decisively and appropriately.  You want to keep your customers and data private and under your direct control.  You want to talk to your customers with your own voice.  You want to be able to see your profits whenever curiosity strikes, and to cut your losses when you feel like it’s time.  You’re a hands-on kind of person and you need a hands-on solution – one that streamlines, solves and automates but never limits your options.

What you want is Moneylender Professional.  It’s a system that’s built exactly for you, and has been refined and enhanced for two decades with the input and advice of hundreds of lenders of all sizes.  No doubt you’ve seen a lot of other systems.  Price tags ranging into the six figures and down to $45 for systems that claim to solve your problems.  By price comparison only, you probably imagine Moneylender to be closer to the hobbyist / beginner end of the spectrum.  In truth, our prices are set so low because we never want to price out someone that has only a few loans.  We’d rather have everyone on our platform than put up a paywall that limits our users to only the biggest enterprises.  There are several lenders with loan counts well into five figures running their fast-paced lending businesses on our platform.  Many professional lenders see our system as the very core of their entire business.

Moneylender is a general purpose loan servicing system.  That means that you’ll have more knobs and dials than you’d get with a system built only for, let’s say, mortgages.  If your loans are extremely uniform, and you like bowling with the bumpers up, another platform might be able to give you a more streamlined experience.  Moneylender has the ability to handle the wacky requirements of a hundred different industries.  In addition to mortgages, Moneylender’s great at construction loans, short- and long-term unsecured debt, lines of credit, leases of all types, auto loans, retail and seller financing, and the broad expanse of bespoke arrangements that accompany business-to-business transactions.  When you choose Moneylender, there will be lots of settings that you can completely ignore – right up until the stormy evening when you discover that the extra options will perfectly suit how you want to handle some exotic borrower shenanigans.

To truly feel comfortable with something new, you need time and practice.  Replacing the old, familiar system with something new and unknown will require courage.  But with Moneylender Professional at least, you’ll have help along the way when you need it.  On top of the User’s Guide that details the behavior or the system’s various controls and the YouTube channel with videos to show you how to use the system and get comfy, we provide phone and email support, too.

Does Moneylender really have what you need?  Can you be confident moving to a new system even when you’re not comfortable moving?  Yes, you can.  Moneylender will run as a demo until you activate a license.  Download and run the demo, start playing with it.  Watch videos and read the User’s Guide to get to know the new system.  Plug in an actual loan or two, and add the first three payments (the demo limits you to three payments on a loan).  Compare what Moneylender gives with your old system.  You can look at the Ledger Transactions report on the Reports menu to see all the bits of math that Moneylender is generating.  There’s an account drop-down at the top left of that report, switch to the various accounts and click Refresh to see the individual balances Moneylender tracks concurrently for each loan.  Now you can see exactly how Moneylender’s calculator is working and you can personally audit every penny of every loan in the system.

The rules of your loan are on the Settings tab at the right side of the main window.  Select a loan and the Settings tab will show all the rules that define how the loan will calculate.  Click on the Loan Settings button and check out the different settings in there.  You’ll want to use the defaults in most cases, but you have a lot of control to fine-tune how Moneylender operates.  Click on the different settings records on the Settings tab, and click the Edit pencil buttons to see more of the controls available to you. Principal settings define when and how much money is given to the borrower.  The Interest settings define the dates that interest begins to accrue and when earned interest is added to the balances.  You have several options for how Moneylender will do the math when calculating the earned interest.  More settings on the Settings tab control when Moneylender will expect payments, how to apply late fee rules, and quite a bit more.  Don’t get too worried about all the different settings, as the defaults are applicable probably 90% of the time.  You can change any setting at any time and Moneylender will happily recalculate the loan using the new settings.

Next, try out the various options on the Servicing menu (make sure you have at least one loan selected) to see the statements and letters that Moneylender can generate for you right out of the box.  Visit Servicing > Manage Templates.  Click on one of the templates and click the 4^th button (paper and pencil icon).  This is the template designer.  You can edit any of the default templates, and even create new ones by copying an existing template or starting from scratch.  The template system is robust enough to even create multi-page loan contracts and attach reports to them.

After that, you should probably check out more of the reports.  Try the Payment Distribution, Financial Activity, Aging, Profit/Loss reports.  All the reports can be modified, too.  Check out Reports > Customize.  Pick a report and click the Edit (pencil) button.  You can see the list of columns, edit a column and look at the drop-down for Record Values.  Those are all the numbers and pieces of data that Moneylender can compute for your use on the current report.  Different report types have different columns available.  On the User’s Guide, under Guides are pages for Record Values for Report Columns that describe how each value is computed.

So now you know how to adjust the way Moneylender does the math, how to set up letters and forms to send to your borrowers, how to get the numbers out of the system in whatever format you want.  You have your hands on the pulse of your loans now.  You can see how Moneylender can step in and replace your old system, but there’s still a few more things to nail down.

You might have hundreds or even thousands of loans in the old system.  Re-entering all that data is going to be a nightmare.  In most cases, you can hire Whitman Technological to build a throwaway import routine to pull your data into Moneylender.  We’ll hop on your computer with you, locate the data and move it to our system.  Then we’ll dig through the data and figure out how to convert it into records in a Moneylender portfolio.  After we do that, we’ll give you back the portfolio with all your loans in it.  If there’s something off about the import, we can adjust the code and rerun it to generate a fresh portfolio.  The cost for this service usually ranges between $500 and $1500, but might be higher if your loans are structured in a particularly odd way or if the data is especially opaque or stored in a challenging format.

That brings up another question, what if you want to leave for a different platform.  You can click File > Export Portfolio Data to create a raw dump of all the tables in your portfolio into excel files.  While the data Moneylender manages is pretty elaborate, you should be able to pick through the tables and columns to find everything you need.  Your data isn’t locked into Moneylender.  The portfolio files are super encrypted, but exporting like this will generate a fully decrypted copy of everything.

Moneylender’s sounding like a good solution now, isn’t it…  But can it grow with your business?  Yep, definitely.  There are teams of 8 and 10 people working in real-time together in the same portfolio with Moneylender’s built-in encrypted networking system.  Copies of Moneylender can talk to each other over a network connection (even across the internet).  The CFO can generate quarterly numbers while two loan officers create new loan applications, an underwriter can attach documents and approve applications, customer service can send off a payoff quote and monthly statements while two clerks record the checks from today’s mail.  Some enterprises have over 30,000 loans in their portfolio, some have close to a billion dollars.  Moneylender was designed to have virtually no limit to the amount of data in a portfolio.  Even these enormous enterprises run their Moneylenders on very modest computers – it’s very frugal with its use of resources.

Moneylender also has an API.  You can integrate and automate to your heart’s content as you decide to replace time consuming tasks with automation.  Whitman Technological can work with your developers at the point where their code will interface with Moneylender to drastically expedite the initial implementation of the API.

 

If you followed along in Moneylender as you read this article, and took the time to play and poke around, you should be feeling a lot more confident about the system as a suitable replacement for whatever you were using before.  If you have any questions feel free to ask by email and phone.