Success Story: Mortgage lender boosts financial management efficiency by 30%

Company overview

Established in 1992, NTFN is a full-service licensed mortgage banker that serves the lending needs of real estate professionals, builders, and individual homebuyers. Based outside Dallas, NTFN does business in 17 states.

Results with Sage Intacct

• Reduced time for closing the books from 30 days to as few as six.
• Increased overall finance efficiency from 25% to 30%.
• Freed up finance team to focus more on strategic initiatives versus manual work.
• Gained deeper business insights with dimensional reporting and drill-down capabilities.

 

“Sage Intacct has not only given us the ability to see what’s happened in the past, it has given us a look through the window to see what’s going to happen in the future. We can use projections and know with more certainty that they’re going to be accurate.”

Von Maharaj Controller, NTFN

NTFN makes a ‘fantastic decision’ as a Sage Intacct early adopter

NTFN, a full-service mortgage banker that’s issued 130,000 mortgage loans worth $21.4 billion, is an early adopter of Sage Intacct. The Texas-based financial services company, with nearly three dozen branches across 17 states, rolled out Sage Intacct in 2003, about five years after the cloud-based financial management system came to market. Gary McKiddy, NTFN’s CFO, says it was a “fantastic decision” that eliminated a myriad of problems with an outdated on-premise accounting application in place at the time.

“Our previous system was frequently crashing. It causes so much grief when you have a system you can’t rely on.” 

Gary, CFO NTFN

“We would have to re-enter transactions and figure out where we were when the system crashed. It just didn’t work well for us and didn’t give us the answers that we needed for the business,” said Gary. During this time, NTFN made the move to Sage Intacct, which served NTFN’s needs capably for more than a decade with a solid foundation for general ledger accounting and reporting. “NTFN sort of grew up on Sage Intacct,” Gary said. “We got maybe too comfortable with the product because it was doing what we needed, but we started attending the annual Sage Intacct Advantage conferences and found out that we could do so much more with the software,” said Gary.

Over time, NTFN’s business model had gradually changed. The company shifted to strictly retail mortgages and moved away from wholesale and correspondent lending, but those changes weren’t reflected in the accounting application. Neither was a move to different profit structures across various branches. Accountants devised workarounds to accommodate the changes, while a new owner began asking for information faster. 

Closing the books 3x faster, with half the staff

With better technology alignment and training, NTFN markedly increased the efficiency and depth of its accounting and reporting processes. The finance team is now closing the books in as few as six days, compared to 30 days in the past.

“Waiting until the end of the month to complete our reporting doesn’t work in this day and age, especially with the way our business and our industry has changed. In terms of efficiency, we’ve seen improvement between 25% and 30% with our Sage Intacct refresh. It’s absolutely freed up more time.”

Gary, CFO NTFN

NTFN has also sped up by about 25% in its quarterly reporting to Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Ginnie Mae, and the National Mortgage Licensing System. With new automation and faster processes, NTFN’s finance team is empowered to do more value-added work with a leaner, four-person team (formerly a count of seven), saving a significant expense in accounting time. “We have a leaner team, yet we’re closing the books in a third of the time,” Gary said. “That’s a testament to Sage Intacct and to our controller and our accountants. Not only are they closing the books faster, they’re doing analysis that we didn’t have time to do before,” said Gary.

New business insights with dimensionality and drill-down

NTFN Controller Von Maharaj says he now has newfound flexibility to slice and dice data with the dimensional reporting capabilities of Sage Intacct, generating greater detail and deeper insights that help guide the business and improve profitability.

“What’s really valuable about Sage Intacct is that from scratch I can create dimensions, business lines, new rules, and GL coding. We can book revenue for loans by all different types, and we’ve created business lines for each of three branch types — traditional, producing, and non-producing. Now we can easily code it to tie a certain branch to a business line.”

Von Maharaj, NTFN Controller 

It’s also easy to produce both consolidated financials across the business, and branch-specific reports accessible only to corporate leaders and managers of a particular branch, without having to piece information together. “Sage Intacct has allowed us to give branch managers access to pull their P&Ls whenever they want, and because it’s coded to their individual branch, they see only what they’re supposed to see,” Von said. In addition, NTFN has a better handle on various types of loan volume, which is critical to calculate accurate gross margins, Gary said. Sage Intacct drill-down capabilities make it easy to examine detail at the branch, loan, and individual loan officer levels — and make course corrections as needed.

The improved efficiencies and opportunities for creativity have boosted employee satisfaction for the finance team. NTFN accountants are no longer working into the evening to close the books or troubleshoot discrepancies in the data. “Job satisfaction just went through the roof, and they’re doing their best work ever,” Gary said. “Our accountants are very talented individuals, and they might have left by now if we hadn’t done something different. We needed to be able to have people do more analysis instead of data entry, and that’s what we’ve been able to accomplish with Sage Intacct,” Von said.

Future-proof your business with Akuna Solutions

As an accredited and awarded Sage Intacct reseller, we view our clients’ success as our own and are dedicated to helping them find their way forward. Offering ongoing support, training, and resources ensures that our clients maximise the benefits of Sage Intacct and stay abreast of the ever-evolving business landscape.

Having implemented Sage Intacct for many businesses in ANZ across diverse industries, our experience spans areas such as Software and SaaS, Family Offices, Non-profit Organisations, Financial Services, NDIS and Human Services and many other industries.

Email us at Akuna Solutions for a free consultation and explore with a Sage Intacct implementation specialist how to leverage modern technology available today to future-proof your business operations.

Blog Image source: BuyandRent Homes on Unsplash