Introduction

Lending companies are unique in their product, workflows, and objectives. Because of this, each company has their own specific information that they want to store. LoanPro has a variety of native fields for companies to input information, but companies are bound to want some information that we don't have a place for. To resolve this, we created custom fields for lenders to track and collect any unique information that they want in their system. 

This article will explain the basics of custom fields and where you can use them in LoanPro. You can read our Using Custom Fields article to learn more about how you can use them in your own operations. 

Highlights

Custom fields provide more flexibility in deciding what kind of data you want to track in your lending operations. You can create custom fields for loans, customers, payments, and source companies. They're created at the tenant level, meaning that any custom field you create will go across all of the loans or customers within your company.

For the customer, custom fields are additional information that you want to add about a customer that is not already a part of the system's defaults. You can add fields related to a customer's general information or about their employer. 

For the loan, there are five areas where you can use custom fields: 

There's a variety of field types you can choose from to fit your company's needs. For instance, if you would like to have a customer's time zone on file, choosing a 'selection' field type will create a dropdown menu with the time zones that the user can choose from. 

Where Do Custom Fields Fit?   

Custom fields are essential for collecting loan and customer information that LoanPro doesn't have native fields for, but they are also beneficial in other areas of the software. The Associated Company Directory, for example, uses custom fields to track which associated companies are assigned to which loans. For instance, if you partner with a few different repossession companies, you can use the custom fields you create to assign those companies to the different loans you need them to repossess. You can do this with other types of associated companies, such as legal firms or collections agencies.

Custom fields can also be used for both customer and internal communication. Our custom forms tool lets you pull loan or customer information and organize them into a template that can be used to communicate with your customers. 

You can add custom fields to any template and have the value from those fields appear in your message. For example, if you have a custom form for payment reminders and want to include a custom field for a processing fee, you can use insert the custom field into the template using variables. When the form is generated within an individual loan, the value inputted for the processing fee for that specific loan will be displayed where the variable was. The process is similar for adding custom fields to notifications that can be sent based on triggers or events. This saves you the extra work of inserting each individual loan's information into the custom form or notification, especially when a large amount of them need to be sent to customers.

This Feature is Not 

• Custom Fields and Computation Fields are similar, but different. Both tools allow you to create information fields, but Computation Fields uses Clojure rules to calculate data from the system while Custom Fields provides an area for information to be put in. 
• Custom Fields won't affect anything else unless you make them part of your automations. While they can be a part of a dynamic and even automatic process, Custom Fields in and of themselves are just convenient places to store information. They won't do anything unless you make them part of a Clojure Rule (such as in the Automation Engine, Trigger-Based Notifications, or as the validation for an Agent Walkthrough).

What’s Next?

Once you understand how custom fields work in the software, you're ready to start creating loan or customer custom fields. You may also be interested in reading our Auto-Calculate Custom Fields article that explains how the custom fields in Loan Setup work.