Mortgage broker reporting software

Reporting has two audiences with almost nothing in common. One is you, trying to run a business. The other is a regulator, a network or a professional indemnity insurer, trying to establish whether your firm treats clients properly.

Most reporting modules are built for the first audience and bolted together for the second. Knowing which you are solving for prevents a lot of wasted configuration.

The commercial reports

Six reports cover most of what a principal needs. If your system produces these without manual assembly, you have enough.

Completions by month, by adviser, with average case size. The baseline.

Conversion at each step: enquiry to appointment, appointment to application, application to completion. Ratios matter more than volumes here, because a fall in one ratio points at a specific part of the process rather than a vague slump.

Income due versus income received. Procuration fees arrive late, arrive short, and occasionally do not arrive. Firms that do not reconcile this lose money quietly, and the amounts are not trivial across a year.

Business by source, with completions rather than enquiries as the measure. Sources that generate volume and sources that generate revenue are frequently not the same.

Protection and general insurance attachment rate. Whatever your view on cross-sales, you should know the number.

Retention: what proportion of clients whose rate expired in a period stayed with you. This is the report most firms cannot produce and the one most predictive of next year.

The oversight reports

These serve a different purpose and are structured differently. Rather than measuring output, they evidence that the firm is watching itself.

Under Consumer Duty, firms are expected to monitor outcomes for clients, including whether particular groups fare worse, and to be able to show they acted on what they found. That is a reporting requirement with teeth.

Useful shapes include: cases where the client is in a vulnerable circumstance and how those cases progressed; complaints and their root causes; file-review sampling results by adviser; cases where the recommendation departed from the cheapest available option and the recorded reason; and clients who took no action at rate expiry, since doing nothing can be a poor outcome.

Appointed representatives will find much of this prescribed by their network, which both constrains and simplifies matters. Directly authorised firms have to design it, and should expect to justify the design.

Why the numbers do not agree

The most common complaint about reporting is that two reports give different answers to the same question. Almost always the cause is definitional rather than technical.

Does a completion count on the completion date or the date the fee was received? Is a case attributed to the adviser who took the enquiry or the one who wrote the business? Does a remortgage for an existing client count as new business? Is a case with two applicants one case or two?

Write these definitions down and keep them with the reports. It sounds bureaucratic. It is the difference between management information and a monthly argument.

Dashboards are usually a distraction

Firms buy reporting expecting a screen with dials. What they actually need is a small pack, produced on a schedule, that somebody reads and acts on.

A dashboard nobody has opened since implementation is common. A monthly pack of six numbers with a paragraph of commentary, discussed for twenty minutes, changes behaviour. The second is unfashionable and works.

If you use dashboards at all, use them for the operational view — what is stuck today — rather than for performance, which is better read as a trend over months.

Getting data out

At some point you will want to analyse something your system does not report. This is normal and no product will cover every question.

So evaluate the export before the reporting module. Can you extract case-level data with dates, stages, values, sources and adviser attribution, in a format you can open in a spreadsheet? If yes, you can answer almost anything with an hour's work. If the only export is a formatted summary, you are limited to the questions the vendor anticipated.

Ask also whether stage history is exportable, not just current state. Duration analysis is impossible without it.

Data protection in reporting

Reports containing client-level personal data are still personal data. A board pack circulated by email with names and financial details attached deserves the same care as any client file.

Aggregate where you can, restrict access where you cannot, and set a retention period for the packs themselves. This is a small thing that occasionally becomes a large one.

A reasonable starting point

If you are building reporting from nothing, do not start with the system. Start by writing down the five questions you want answered every month, and the definitions behind each.

Then find out whether your existing system can answer them, which it often can once someone spends an afternoon on it. Firms buy additional reporting tools surprisingly often to answer questions their current platform already handles.

Capability and pricing differ across UK broker platforms and change with releases; confirm specifics with the supplier before assuming a report exists.