Contracts Management

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How many times has your team not remembered to cancel a contract within its 90 day penalty free cancellation window? How much did that cost your bank in terms of having to continue a contract, with a sub-performing vendor, for another year?  How on earth does a lightly staffed business keep on track with all these dates?

Well, it’s easy with the new TrakPointe™ Contracts Management Module.

Key benefits include:

• Track all of your key vendors, contracts and key dates in one place
• Automatically receive email reminders ahead of time to check the renewal status for each contract
• Keep an organized archive of your previous contracts, allowing you to show regulators that you are on top of your vendor management
• Don’t skip a beat when someone in your bank leaves-  all the data is there in TrakPointe™, not in a  myriad of Excel spreadsheets

premsundaram @ June 22, 2010

Visual Dashboards

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A picture is worth a thousand words!

And now with the new Silverlight™ powered Dashboard feature of TrakPointe™ available standard in every implementation you can create your own dashboards in minutes.   Incorporating a full powered project and performance management system, TrakPointe™ allows you to define your projects, your measures, and quickly enter in data.   Our philosophy behind this module is to keep it simple. Too many performance dashboard systems get too complicated too quickly.  Our goal is to allow you to quickly enter data for the month and then be able to show the dashboard at your next meeting quickly and with style.   Contact us for a full demonstration of the dashboard feature.

Now you can track and display the critical bank measures and focus your management discussions on the ‘exceptions’.  Let TrakPointe™ help to focus discussions at your next meeting.

(Silverlight is a registered Trademark of Microsoft).

premsundaram @ June 15, 2010

Loan Pipeline

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Do you have the right Loan Pipeline report every Monday morning when you meet with your team?  Or are your business development and loan officers turning up at the meeting each with their own version of the truth and no -one really knows the correct status of each loan?

You’ve probably been trying to track with with Microsoft Excel, but are running into these familiar problems:

- Multiple variations of the same spreadsheet owned by each person, no one consistent reliable version
- People spread over multiple locations, no easy access to the same spreadsheet – too many emails flying about
- Hours spent by staff each Friday preparing their reports for the Monday meeting
- Innefficiency  in the process as people involved waste time and energy asking about status and ‘where’s the loan’?
- Money lost as the loan fees due to come get delayed by slow process.  A dollar received today is worth more than a dollar received tomorrow.

To solve these issues, TrakPointe™ provides the Loan Pipeline module.  The simple entry screens allow the loan officers and team to enter data quickly, with its ability to track multiple loans per loan package,  and the system provides the automated, reliable and accurate reports to you.

Visibility over the whole Pipeline is achieved from Initial Loan Application through to Funding.   Now as a Manager you know the status of all your Loans.

premsundaram @ June 7, 2010

Audit Compliance

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Audit Issue Tracking – Truth and Consequences

The dreaded question comes from the lead regulator, “The Excel file you provided indicated that all of the issues from last year’s audit were corrected. But, it seems that this one is in the same condition as last year. Could you explain this, please?”

Now the scrambling begins in earnest. How did we miss correcting that? How did it get signed off as completed in the file? Why didn’t we know about this? What can we do to not get caught again next year?

Is Audit Issue Correction a Task?

Or is it a Process?

“We don’t have processes. What I mean to say is, we don’t use them.” This response came from a Fortune 500 executive during a recent interview about his company’s processes. So his company doesn’t fulfill orders? Doesn’t sell products?

Each year when your audit is over, you take the examiner’s report, extract the list of audit issues and assign them to various people for correction prior to the next annual audit. Task. Each person takes corrective action on the issues they were assigned. Task. Each person then signs off that corrective action on his or her assigned issue(s) has been completed. Task. As each item is completed, the central log of outstanding issues is annotated as ‘completed.’ Task.

Together, this series of individual tasks string together and become your audit issue tracking and correction process.

Human Nature is as Powerful as Mother Nature

Every community bank CFO has an audit issue tracking process, but human nature is always there to play its hand.

So how does human nature get the best of us? There always seems to be too few people and too much to do in community banks. Providing the level of personalized service that community banks are known for takes effort and soaks up time.

With this daily workload, those audit issue items just seem to get pushed to the back burner and likely won’t receive much attention until just prior to the next examination.

Three Simple Steps to Happy

Examiners

It’s really pretty easy to get those audit items off of the back burner and avoid the last minute rush to get them done three days prior to next examination. Just follow these three steps:

First. Create a prioritized list of all of the issues and who in the bank will be responsible for each task. At the same time, determine if any special resources are required or if more that one department will be involved. Right, you already do this.

Second. Establish a completion date for each task that fits with the existing staff workload and with the urgency associated with each issue. Confirm with each task owner that they know what the task entails and that they can meet the target completion date. Ditto, you do this as well.

Third. Implement a simple visual task tracking system to automate the process and place accountability for completion where is belongs, on the task owner.

Task owners will always work to accomplish what managers track. If there is no active tracking system, human nature will deftly slip those tasks to the back burner and you’ll once again be working feverishly just before that next examination.

Is Microsoft Excel Still the Best Tool?

Microsoft Excel has been the “go to” application for tracking virtually everything for decades now. We use it for calculations, storing rosters, task lists, virtually everything. And it does a pretty good job. Plus, it’s relatively inexpensive.

But, these Excel files just sit in your system. They aren’t proactive. Items with suspense dates require manual effort and that’s where human nature sneaks in again.

Spreadsheet Risk

Human nature being what it is, we know that everyone likes to have their own copy of the tracking spreadsheet and suddenly, in the blink of an eye, they no longer are the same. Dates and status changes occur. The train is off the track.

If Excel Doesn’t Do the Trick, What’s the Answer? There are a number of solutions to preventing a derailment and we, of course, have a favorite candidate. Curious?

The Ideal Post-Excel Solution

Before we get to the solution, let’s consider what we think an ideal post-Excel task tracking solution should deliver:

It should be telephone-grade reliable; it should just work

It needs a simple reminder function for management oversight, with an internal audit function – who did what and when

It should include visual reports to quickly show the progress of all open issues

It should look like something staff already use, with an absolute minimum training requirement

It should be simple, affordable, and expandable to other task tracking requirements – contracts management, marketing, lending, and deposit gathering) – with a good ROI

Finally, it should carry no 12 month annual contract lock-in.

TrakPointe™ for Community

Banks

Meet TrakPointe™, the task tracking and management solution that requires no additional learning or software implementation in your bank.

TrakPointe™ is built from the ground up on Microsoft technologies, so it works natively with your Microsoft Explorer, Outlook, Office, and SharePoint applications.

TrakPointe™ is a hosted service (but you can implement it within your bank if you wish), so there is no need to purchase additional hardware or add another management task to your IT team’s workload.

TrakPointe™ has over 12 standard modules, including audit issue tracking, and can be used right out of the box or tailored to your specific process needs within just a few days.

TrakPointe™ is so good that it comes with no annual contract requirement and no annual maintenance fee. If it ever fails to meet your requirements, you can cancel your subscription with 30 days notice and receive a full refund of your current year’s license fees.

Stay a Step Ahead of Your

Examiners

A TrakPointe™ solution gives you the tool you need to snap human nature back in line. Deploy TrakPointe™ and the next time the examiners arrive you’ll be able to show exactly who corrected each audit item and when. Guaranteed!

What Next? First Visit TrakPointe.com, explore the available modules, calculate the financial benefit and payback period for deployment at your bank, and experience the future of task tracking and management for community banks.

roberthess @ May 31, 2010