How to measure mortgage broker admin savings

Claims about saved admin time are easy to make and almost impossible to compare, because nobody publishes their method. A brokerage can produce its own number in a few weeks with a notebook and some discipline, and that number will be worth more than any figure a supplier can offer, because it reflects your case mix and your team.

Pick the tasks worth measuring

Do not try to measure everything. Choose five or six tasks that happen on most cases and consume real time:

• Requesting documents and chasing them.
• Writing up notes after a client conversation.
• Sending progress updates.
• Entering the same client information into a second system.
• Booking and rearranging appointments.
• Preparing a case for file review.

If a task happens twice a month, leave it out. The savings that matter are on the things that repeat.

Take a baseline before anything changes

For two to four weeks, record two figures per task: how many times it happened, and roughly how long each one took. Rough is fine; consistent is essential. Ranges recorded the same way each time are more useful than precise numbers recorded differently by each person.

Include the waiting and the redoing where it is material. A document request that takes four minutes to send and twelve minutes to sort out afterwards is a sixteen-minute task, and only counting the four is how firms end up with savings that never appear in anyone's day.

Have the people doing the work record it, not a manager estimating on their behalf. Estimates from a distance are systematically wrong in the direction of whatever the estimator hopes.

The calculation

Monthly hours saved equals the old average minutes per task, minus the new average, multiplied by the monthly volume, divided by sixty.

Then subtract the costs the arithmetic hides: time spent reviewing automated output, correcting errors, maintaining templates and rules, and answering client questions the new process created. Subtracting those is what separates a real figure from a brochure figure.

If the result is negative, that is a finding, not a failure. It tells you the change was aimed at the wrong task, and it has cost you a few weeks rather than a year.

A worked example, with the caveats

Suppose your firm sends document requests on eighty cases a month. The baseline shows each request takes six minutes to prepare and, on average, another fourteen minutes across the case in chasing, re-requesting and filing. That is twenty minutes per case, or roughly twenty-seven hours a month.

After changing the process, the same measurement gives eleven minutes per case, or about fifteen hours. The apparent saving is twelve hours. Then subtract two hours a month spent maintaining checklists and templates, and an hour spent dealing with clients confused by the new route. The honest figure is nine hours.

Those numbers are illustrative and yours will differ, possibly by a lot. The point is the shape of the sum: a measured before, a measured after, and an explicit deduction for the cost the change introduced. Any figure produced without that third element is optimistic by construction.

Measure quality alongside speed

A process that is quicker and worse is not an improvement. Track, over the same period, the number of documents missing at submission, duplicate requests, missed deadlines, corrections made before something was sent, complaints, and how long clients take to respond.

Watch particularly for work that has moved rather than disappeared. An automation that saves an adviser ten minutes by creating fifteen minutes of checking for an administrator has made the firm slower while looking like progress on the adviser's timesheet.

Compare like with like

Record the case mix, the team size and the monthly volume alongside every measurement. A month with fewer complex self-employed cases will look more efficient whether or not anything changed.

Where you can, keep a control: let one adviser continue the old way for the measurement period. It feels wasteful and it is the only way to be confident that the difference is the change rather than the season.

Read a sample of cases as well as the numbers, and ask advisers a direct question: did this reduce what you were carrying in your head, or did it add another thing to check? That answer often contradicts the metrics, and it is usually the one that predicts whether the change survives.

Turn the saving into something

An hour saved that gets absorbed into the day proves nothing and will be argued about at the next budget. Decide in advance what released time is for: calling new enquiries faster, running more annual reviews, better file checking, training, or simply fewer evenings.

Name the person accountable for that outcome and review it at thirty, sixty and ninety days. If the released hours cannot be seen anywhere, either they were not real or they leaked, and both are worth knowing.

Report it honestly

When you write the result down, state the baseline period, the case mix, what was included, what was excluded and what you subtracted. A number with its method attached can be defended, repeated next year and compared against the following change.

The aim is not to automate everything. It is to make the advice process more reliable while giving advisers more of their time back for the parts of the job that need a person.