Software Provider Offers Tips for Balancing IT Implementation Efforts

Using lessons learned from years of supplying accounting software for the mortgage banking and real estate industries, one expert offers tips for managing a better system implementation of any type.

Brian Lynch, president and founder of Irvine, Calif.- based Advanced Systems, noted how the reliance on IT staff drags out implementations and costs financial institutions because it delays ROI, and some organizations find ways to reduce their dependency on IT staff during an implementation.

“Probably the number one ingredient to a successful implementation is management’s commitment to the task,” Lynch suggested. From that point, the selection of the appropriate software can make a big difference. “In our world, we do accounting software dedicated to the mortgage industry. Let’s imagine you bought a builder’s product instead of a lender’s product, then you’re looking at making all kinds of modifications.”  That might involve not just of IT, but custom programming and additional staff involvement.

Lynch noted there are some basic IT staff participation requirements such as backing up the data and provide the infrastructure, hardware, managing users and security, creating reports and integration with third party products.

When it comes to dashboards, data warehouses, and reporting, financial institutions should ask how much of that is built into the product versus having to be generated outside.

“A tremendous time-sink for a lot of implementations is the custom generation of reports. Our philosophy has been to provide a large library of standard reports within the software,” Lynch said. Their reports library was developed, honed, and refined over the years through their interaction with over 300 credit unions, mortgage bankers, depositories and other clients. “We have over 700 standard reports. A new client starting today doesn’t have to build from ground zero.”

Another important aspect of implementation is third-party integration.” It’s the kind of thing where you need IT people and developers to get involved to make things work.” Lynch explained they’ve used comma separated value files available from Excel. “It gives the end user the ability to create an import of that data and pull it into the system.”

The ease with which users can get the data into the system without involving IT is a big deal, Lynch pointed out, and can be investigated out during the selection process for whatever solution needed.

“We have over 300 lenders as clients using our general ledger and accounting system and that system records transactions at a loan level to basically facilitate doing the reconciliations and the profit-and-loss reporting that our client’s need,” Lynch maintained.

“If you had to hand enter it, it would probably just be unworkable,” Lynch said. For many years that was probably the case. In the early nineties Advantage Systems brought this data into spreadsheets and imported it into an accounting system, providing its clients with the ability to drill down to the loan level detail to support an account balance.

“The nature of the beast for a lot of systems out there, is that ‘we bought this new system and now we’re going figure out what we want to do with it.’ There’s a lot of custom programming and custom integrations involved and IT gets involved with that,” Lynch said. “we’ve heard horror stories of other systems where people are developing a functionality from scratch that takes six months, a year, or more to get implemented. Our implementations go in 30 to 60 days.”

Advantage’s systems can do commissions, interim servicing, imaging, budgeting, ACH transfers, and branch reporting, all designed to meet different clients’ needs. Advantages systems include Accounting for Mortgage Bankers, a general ledger product specifically designed for the mortgage banking industry; ApprovalSoft, which allows users to scan or link supporting documentation; and CONTRACK, a project management and accounting software package for real estate developers and general contractors. They have a fully browser-based version of AMB on the way.