Overview
Life on QuickBooks at Wyndham Capital Mortgage had reached an unacceptable level of manual data entry, Excel spreadsheets and data manipulation. Having squeezed every last drop they could out of the off-the-shelf financial tool, CFO Jeremy Abig and Controller Lisa Gawlik, determined that if they wanted to continue to support the growth of the company, they’d have to upgrade their accounting systems & supporting processes. This decision was further vindicated after seeing their team struggling to handle the workloads during a particularly fruitful year. By implementing Loan Vision, they were able to automate the majority of their accounting processes and now have complete confidence in the scalability of their department.
Challenges
Change is often easier to accomplish before it’s absolutely necessary. This is why, in 2016, Abig and Gawlik began to take a look at their finance department’s operational shortcomings and how their accounting tools were playing a part. While their team was able to process the data from the average 500 loans per month at a speed that was deemed acceptable, they completed most of their work with only generic technologies that weren’t specifically designed to handle the intricacies of mortgage accounting. Having complete confidence in their leveraging of Quickbooks functionality, in a year that saw significant volume growth started to accentuate a number of limits of that system. “When we saw a spike in business a few years back, we noticed that QuickBooks wasn’t able to handle all the transactions we were putting in,” admitted Gawlik. “Our goal was always to grow, and at that point, we knew that we were going to have to find a system that would be able to handle that growth.”
Gawlik found that the constant manipulation of data needed to just enter it into the G/L was bogging down her team and holding up other processes such as reconciliations. She mentioned, “An overwhelming majority of our reconciliations were completed manually in Excel spreadsheets. Between this and the time-consuming nature of manually importing our loan information, most of our accounts wouldn’t be reconciled until a month in arrears.”
