CHALLENGE
In 2011, FBC Mortgage, LLC wasn’t an overly complicated organization, “The business was pretty simple at the time, originating around $25 million a month. We weren’t selling to agencies or handling the servicing,” said Dyron Watford, long-time CFO at FBC Mortgage. However, they were beginning to experience some growth and needed an accounting system that would give them the loan level detail that QuickBooks couldn’t. Loan Vision had yet to hit the market, so they were left with the only industry specific solution available at the time.
In the beginning, the solution was “just what the doctor ordered,” as Watford said, but the business continued to expand and they grew too complicated for the outdated system. “The performance you would expect out of the technology just wasn’t there,” said Watford. “We found that the system had performance issues when uploading large invoices, taking anywhere from three to six hours.”
Already struggling with the loss of efficiency as they grew, the finance team at FBC Mortgage was thrown a curveball. “We moved to the new web-based version of our accounting system and it ended up shutting us down entirely for four whole days. We were trying our best to keep up with pen and paper,” expressed Watford. “It was hard because you have a trusted business partner of years telling you it’s going to work, and you don’t have any reason to believe otherwise. Even after we got the system back up and running, our performance issues still continued.”
SOLUTION
With the issues seeming to increase by the day and an overextended team, Watford looked for a resolution. Knowing his department needed an accounting system to be specific to the industry and provide loan level detail, his options came down to tailoring a generic financial tool or Loan Vision. Not only did Loan Vision offer the specifications his team needed for the industry, it also was going to be able to automate many of their 275 individual accounting processes.
However, they weren’t out of the clear quite yet. “Being understaffed did make it tougher to have a good training process. In addition to that, the first few months of the year is already full with taxes, audits, and closing the books,” lamented Watford. “However, the Loan Vision team was there to support us and assisted us through implementation. With their help and the strength of my team, we were able to get comfortable using the system.”
