The Automation Engine (formerly called ‘Rules Applied’) is a customizable automation system in LMS. When an account meets your criteria, it automatically takes action in line with your custom business logic. Both the criteria and actions can be customized to align with your own specific products and processes.

Criteria are recorded with a coding language called Clojure. They’re expressed with equations and variables, creating something like a true-or-false statement describing the loan. When the statement is true, it takes the  actions you specified on the loan.
Actions consist of just about everything that an agent user could manually do in the software, like adding a charge or changing an account status.(The full list is included below.)

Since most companies don’t have a Clojure expert on retainer, we recommend enlisting the help of LoanPro’s own Clojure experts. Just reach out to your normal LoanPro contact, and they can  help configure it for you.
 

Configuring automations

To set up your own automations, you will first need to navigate to Settings > Loan > Automation Engine, where you’ll see an ordered list of your automations. (This is also the order in which they’ll run during Daily Maintenance, and it can be reordered with the drag-and-drop tools to the left of each item.)

To create a new automation, click 'Add' in the top right corner.

Basic Settings

First, click the 'Add' button or the edit icon next to an existing rule, which opens a window where you can enter the name, status, Clojure rule, and a few other settings.

Start by setting a name for the automation, then selecting the status of "Active" or "Inactive". If you set the status to 'Inactive', the system will not actively check loans for the rule criteria.

Beneath the name, you’ll see the Clojure rule that determines your criteria for when the actions take effect on the account. Since most companies don’t have a Clojure expert on staff, many of our clients enlist the help of LoanPro’s team to configure their automations and rules, but for an overview of the language and how it works in LoanPro, check out our article on Clojure.

The checkboxes below the rule determine when the rule is evaluated against accounts. 

• Selecting 'Add to New Loans' means the automation will be evaluated on new loans created after it.. 
• Selecting 'Preactivation Loan' will only include loans that are not yet activated. Checking this box removes the option to evaluate in daily maintenance because daily maintenance only runs on active loans. 
• Selecting 'Evaluate in Daily Maintenance' tells the system to check loans for the determined rule criteria when your tenant account runs daily maintenance. 
• Selecting 'Evaluate in Real Time' tells the system to check loans whenever an interaction on the loan occurs, such as making a payment.
   

Actions

Once you have set up your rule, you can add actions by clicking 'New Action' in the bottom right corner. Like rules, actions are highly customizable. Begin by naming the action. Next, you will need to determine what changes, or actions, the system makes to loans that fit the criteria set by your rules. 

Here’s a full list of available actions, sorted into the same categories used within the software:

 Once you’ve added your actions, click 'Save Changes' to finalize your new automation.

Reusing Clojure rules with the Rules Manager

Even once you've got the hang of Clojure, it can be time consuming to write out the same rule in several different places. The Rules Manager solves this problem—you can save a list of rules, and then pull from that list any time you're writing one.

The rules manager is located in Settings > Company > Rules Manager.

You'll see a list of the existing rules saved in your system. These will be available anytime you're asked to write a rule. Each entry includes the name, the text of the rule itself, whether and how the answer is rounded, and the type of output it yields.

To create a new rule, the black 'Add' button in the top right corner. That'll bring up this window with fields for basic info, and one large field where you can enter your Clojure rule.

The top section is where you can enter basic information about the rule. 

On the lower half of the screen, you'll see the formula editor, where you'll enter the rule. If you need help with that part, check out our articles on Clojure rules.

Note the black 'Load Existing Rule' button in the top right. This lets you load a rule that's already saved in your Rule Manager, and it's how you'll actually use the rules you save when you're adding them in other parts of the software. Whenever the system asks you to create a rule, that button will pull up a list of the rules you've already saved.

When you’ve set up the rule, just click ‘Save’.