We’d be willing to bet that your team has some creative workarounds for the sometimes annoying, yet generally unavoidable mismatches between the various systems you use to ensure SBA compliance.
As an experienced SBA lender service provider, we’ve had to help our clients come up with a few ourselves.
And “systems” in this case includes everything from the literal systems – the apps you use to interact with SBA and the rest of your bank’s tech stack – to the inter-departmental, inter-team, interpersonal interactions that are so important.
You know what I mean by workarounds: the unwritten procedures your people use to complete tasks that otherwise either fall through the cracks or aren’t quite accurate.
Don’t feel bad. It’s normal, and even inevitable.
Let’s face it, there are challenges in making sure SBA’s ETran system captures everything it’s supposed to. The mapping may be out of sync, your system may not contain all the fields ETran needs, and your system may not calculate transactions the way SBA requires.
No knock on anyone. It would be a true miracle if everything “just worked”!
And we want to recognize, with a great big huzzah, the creativity your SBA loan packaging teams demonstrate in making it all work despite those challenges.
Someone on your team has to go through every field on every page in ETran to make sure they’re all captured correctly.
Someone on your team has to verify and often recalculate payment amounts (Principal vs. Interest spreads) and interest paid-to-date. And that often means revising data in both your internal system and SBA.
And guess what? Those workarounds, no matter how necessary and creative they may be (I think I hear your teams laughing in the background, what we might call the “laugh of truth”), they can also create problems.
Often, the person who developed the workaround is the only person who knows about it.
Which means that if they’re out on vacation (to give a happy example), and someone else has to do the work? That’s when problems start showing up in your SBA loan packages.
Let's be clear: there is no magic wand to wave that will solve these system-syncing problems. There are just too many variables for all the system vendors and SBA to manage, and things change all the time.
So please, applaud the creativity of your SBA team.
And then, please ask them to document the workarounds they’ve created. Ask them to create checklists and process documentation.
As an SBA lender service provider, we’ve seen how our clients’ creative SBA team members develop efficient, effective workarounds. But we’ve also seen that they seldom document what they’ve done, leading to delays and mistakes when someone else picks up the work.
Applaud your people’s brilliance – and ask them to document it for current and future team members to use!
Want some help with that? We love process documentation and checklists! Give us a call at 877-576-0819, or reach out through our Contact form and we can talk about how we can help – perhaps with SBA Lender training that might even make some of those workarounds unnecessary.
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