Anyone who works in title is all too familiar with the many moving pieces and partnerships that need to be in place to complete a single closing. It’s often overwhelming. In fact many leading title experts will tell you that when work heats up, time management is the ultimate skill – ranking even higher than knowing the intricacies of a closing.
Surprisingly, many title companies and law firms are still manually managing their vendor tasks. This puts the company in a position where they have to proactively and frequently check in with vendors in order to get work done. These check-ins add up to an incredible amount of time and can easily lead to important tasks slipping through the cracks.
Luckily, there are several easy ways that modern title companies and law firms can improve vendor management to avoid mistakes and speed up the day.
Work on an Automated To-Do List to Boost Business
Have you ever tried to count how many steps are on your to-do list to complete an order with a vendor? Not just placing an order, but everything from knowing it needs to be placed to fulfillment to payment and so on. A good workflow to-do list that’s repeatable, documented, and even automated will make you a lot more efficient and help ensure your staff is consistent and not reinventing the wheel on each closing.
Use Reporting to Quantify Performance
So much of our lives and business revolves around relationships. An amazing relationship may sometimes mask vendor performance that’s not doing what it should for your business. Or worse, hurting your business. Put in place simple reporting benchmarks and tools to see how your vendors are doing. You can’t know what to improve if you don’t have anything to measure against.
Don’t Trust Your Own Typing
Avoid Accounting Pitfalls
Get an accounting software that’s designed specifically for the title industry and avoid the pitfalls of an incorrect disbursement or a costly typo.
A Bloomberg BNA accounting study found that over a quarter of accounting errors are made because of manual data entry mistakes. Your company is collecting and disbursing thousands, if not millions, of dollars every day. Don’t rely on manual data entry or configuring a general software like Quickbooks to fit your specific title business. Get an accounting software that’s designed specifically for the title industry and avoid the pitfalls of an incorrect disbursement or a costly typo.
Send Payment, Not Paper Checks
Have any magazine subscriptions? Imagine you had to pay for each delivery with a new printed and mailed check. Seems silly. Understandably many in the title industry still cut checks to vendors. There are many reasons industry professionals give for this practice: “nothing can manage bulk payments and merge them the way I need”, “paying for services that already happened adds complexity” etc. However, the complexity around payments doesn’t need to be such a headache and you should be exploring new ways of getting payments to your vendors. After all, you’re in the title business, not the payments business.
Easily Access Your Contacts
If you’re working off a paper rolodex or even a spreadsheet it’s time to stop. Move everything into a vendor management system (VMS) or customer relationship manager (CRM). Your contacts will remain up to date, you can access them whenever you want, and link them to everything you do.
Learn more about Qualia’s Vendor Marketplace here.
