10 Best Document Management Strategies to Build Your Mortgage Business
Mortgage businesses often find themselves smothered beneath paperwork, files, documents, etc. Here are the top 10 strategies for mortgage businesses to become more streamlined and profitable.
By relying less on paper, and more on electronic storage and sharing mediums, mortgage businesses can save money and increase customer satisfaction.
Use Paperless Document Management Software
Paper-based organizations have more errors, due in large part to repetitive, manual processes. These errors can have a drastic impact on your business, resulting in lost clients, lost revenue, or even sanctions and fines. Research shows that documents processed through an electronic document management system have 30% fewer errors than paper documents.
On average, this saves organizations 10% in their operational costs per year. 25% of lost documents are never found, and going paperless decreases employee’s time searching for documents by 2 hours per week.
Shift Your Document Management Software to the Cloud
Cloud-based document management gives employees more flexibility with the ability to access documents from anywhere, anytime. This tends to increases employee’s efficiency and allows for quicker customer servicing. In addition, Cloud-based storage has a lower upfront capital costs—as it requires less IT infrastructure, saving on server costs—and provides for a licensing model that can be marked as a business expense each year.
Plus, mortgage companies that have transitioned to a Cloud-based document management system report increased performance in employees as well as increased sales.
Allow Mobile Document Access to Your Sales Organization
Mobile access gives your mortgage officers the ability provide better service by enhancing organization, facilitating much quicker responses. Mobile document access allows your mortgage officers to respond in real time to requests even while out of the office at loan closings or in transit. In addition, a mobile app can increase response times, loan inputs, accountability, and turnaround times for processes.
Increase Collaboration Through Digital Sharing
A secure portal allows for fast and easy collaboration and sharing of documents between mortgage officers and service providers. When documents are shared, the other parties receive notifications and are instantly able to view and process them.
The time and date are recorded for the receipt of the documents, and expiration times for sharing can be input, so that documents automatically expire. This makes removal of old shared documents automatic, helping to keep liability in check.
In addition, secure portals allow for faster gathering of documents from customers. This decreases follow up time from initiation of the application to submission to processing and underwriting while also decreasing time spent inputting documents.
Utilize Zonal OCR for Automatic Input, Organization, and Naming of Documents
Zonal OCR allows for custom templates around common documents. This means that when documents are processed through Zonal OCR, the software reads information in specific areas of the pages and automatically sorts, names, and files that information.
This streamlines the naming of documents and the folder structure for each loan and significantly cuts back on time spent processing information. Zonal OCR can save your processors and officers hours each week by automating document processing.
Provide Document Conversion to Universal Document Types for Universal Document Recognition
Documents come in all sorts of formats; paper, PDF, Word, Excel, JPEG, TIFF, and others. Furthermore, documents may be received in diverse ways, such as scans, emails, FTP, portals, phone pictures, Microsoft Office documents, and faxes.
Conversion and readability can become much less tedious through conversion tools. Conversion to PDFs from images, scanned documents, emails, and programs are most easily accomplished with a print driver that simultaneously converts documents to a PDF and stores the document securely in your document management system.
Increase Transparency and Reduce Costs by Providing Access to Auditors, Service Providers, and Insurers
while reserving the ability to lock down documents not applicable to the various job functions. Cloud-based document management systems improve transparency for auditors and reduce the need to physically send auditors to mortgage offices.
This decreases costs, drastically improves the efficiency of the auditor, helping them to be finished and on their way faster, and improves acquisition costs for loan pools. Auditors are able to audit more files, offices, and officers exponentially by not spending major blocks of time traveling between offices. Though role-based security, you can still ensure that each job function is allowed access only to the applicable documents.
Decrease Time Spent Scanning Paper Documents Through TWAIN Scanners and Interactive Software
Although you have streamlined your document system by easy conversion of electronic files, customer and outside organizations may still bring in physical documents.
Chances are, you have probably invested in a large comprehensive copy, scan, and fax machine. By providing TWAIN desktop scanners to a few key employees, you can drastically reduce the time spend in organizing scanned pages.
Through a desktop TWAIN scanner, your employees can remain at their desk working on tasks and workflows while scanning in documents.
Documents are not automatically batched and numerically named. Instead, through a scanning interface to your document management system, pages will be previewed on the computer screen.
Pages can be pulled into separate documents, named, and saved in one simultaneous motion. Furthermore, your employees can continue working while the scanning is occurring, so a large amount of documents will take very little employee time.
Increase Security and Maintain Privacy Easier
Through Cloud collaboration and role-based access. Documents are stored and transmitted with high levels of encryption, locking down customer information much more securely than paper documents are locked down in a filing cabinet.
Through web portal sharing, the risks of documents loss through sharing, email, fax, or mail is eliminated and internal document loss can be eliminated.
Avoid Regulatory Fines, Compliance Headaches, and Reputation Risk Through Audit Trails, Automatic Retention, and Role-Based Security
As regulation and government oversight continue to grow, a highly customizable and scalable document management system provides the tools for mortgage companies to meet all the requirements with ease.
Un-editable audit trails provide a record of transactions. These record trails are not possible with paper transactions. Automated retention locks down documents, protects them, and tracks the timelines for destruction automatically. Immediate retrieval of a transaction is available and critical to support retention of documents, state and federal audits, and other needs.
About eFileCabinet
Since 2001 eFileCabinet has been an innovator in electronic document management systems. eFileCabinet services provides document management systems for over 150,000 businesses and continues to innovate new tools and features that make document management simple and enhance business growth. As the recipient of multiple awards, eFileCabinet is committed to helping you to do more!