GreatAmerica Financial Services and SalesChain Team Up for Credit Application Submittal Tutorial Video

20 years ago, SalesChain was founded as a lease portfolio management platform. Though our offering has expanded to include best in class CRM, proposal and order pricing, commissions and document generation tools, leasing has always remained at the core of our platform.

For this reason, we have always maintained strong relationships with the office technology industry’s top leasing companies. We have bidirectional integrations with many of these platforms, allowing SalesChain to pull lease portfolios from the finance companies as well as push credit applications directly into their systems.

In celebration of our awesome integration, Robin Fonck of GreatAmerica Financial Services joined SalesChain University host Matt Szczygiel in the creation of a credit application submittal tutorial for SalesChain users. You can watch the video or read a transcription below!

About SalesChain: SalesChain is the complete business automation solution for office equipment dealers. A CIO Magazine top 10 Workflow Automation Company, their goal is to help businesses see greater profitability and increased efficiency through better automation and synchronized data. SalesChain helps dealers create smart data that can be used across the business to create more efficient operations.

About GreatAmerica: GreatAmerica is the largest independent, family-owned national commercial equipment finance company in the U.S. with over $2.4 billion in assets and life-to-date finance originations of $13.5 billion. GreatAmerica was established in Cedar Rapids, Iowa in 1992 and today is organized into six divisions. It has a staff of over 600 employees with offices in Iowa, Georgia, Minnesota, and Illinois.

Matt Szczygiel, SalesChain: In this video, we’ll show you how to submit a credit application through SalesChain’s order breakdown utility. And one of our friends at GreatAmerica Financial Services will show you how submitting your credit application through SalesChain can help make the process smoother for you.

Before you submit a credit request for approval through SalesChain, there are a couple of things we can check to make sure that all our information is as accurate as possible before we hit submit.

First, we want to make sure that equipment configurations and our manifest use is accurate as possible. If you don’t have your equipment properly configured in SalesChain, this may impact the dollar amount that your client is approved or declined for. You can check the configuration of your equipment in the products tab of SalesChain’s order breakdown.

Next, let’s move to the Pricing Tab of our order and take a look at the Financing Summary.

We want to make sure that the credit level, leasing company, product, and term are correct. Notice that the level and factor will be calculated for you by the system automatically, but that you do have override capabilities for that factor if necessary.

We want to make sure that we’ve entered a correct lease buyout value for either a competitive lease, our own lease, or both in the pricing tab as well. It’s important that these numbers are placed in the correct location so that the credit application can be properly filled out and submitted.

If the customer is upgrading a lease where your company was the selling dealer, you need to enter the dollar amount into the lease upgrade field (which may or may not be marked with your company name).

If you’re buying a customer out of a competitive lease, use the competitive lease upgrade box. If your company charges the lease return fee, there may be a field where you can enter this value as well.

It is possible to associate this new deal with an existing lease if it is in your SalesChain system. We’ll do this in the Financing Tab of the order breakdown. You’ll see that the dollar value for the lease buyout value, if you entered one, has carried through to this screen as well.

I’ll click lookup to see if there are any leases with this account existing and use the checkboxes on the left-hand side to select whatever leases I want to associate this deal with.

You can select one or many existing leases. Once I’ve selected the lease or leases that I’m upgrading on this deal, I can designate this as an upgrade to return, an upgrade, to keep, etc. using the upgrade types dropdown.

I’ve invited Robin Fonck of Great America to come record with me today, and she’ll start by telling us what information they are looking for once this credit application hits their system.

Robin Fonck, GreatAmerica: So, most of the time we are looking for a variety of information in the credit application, really helping us understand the situation. So, items like the application type, are we looking at a dollar out or are we looking at maybe an FMV? We’re looking for the total financed amount. We’re looking for the terms so how long do we want the contract to last for?

We’re looking at possible purchase options at the end of the agreement. And lastly, we’re really looking for any additional customer information that you can share with us. So, once we have all of that information in our system, we begin processing the application and then we can reach out to you with any additional questions. Any information that provides clarity to the request can help speed the approval process and really improve the end user experience.

So, whether that’s the invoicing needs, the billing requirements or even possible future changes to the contract, the more we know, the easier the process can be.

Matt Szczygiel, SalesChain: Alright, now that we’ve done our due diligence and double-checked these figures, we’re ready to submit our credit application. In the Finance tab, I’ll click “submit applications”. I’ll be presented with a dialog box that lets me select which of my finance companies I want to submit this credit application to. In this case, I’m going to select GreatAmerica and click “Submit” at the bottom right-hand corner.

When a credit request has been submitted, your line item will be assigned a credit app ID, the date and time will be recorded, the financing company’s application ID will be returned, and a message will appear at the top in red, confirming that the request has been submitted. At this point, you can hit close and exit your proposal and order.

Any additional attempts to submit a credit request from this order will be met with a dialog box telling you that a request has already been submitted.

Robin, what sort of advantages can this process have for dealers?

Robin Fonck, GreatAmerica: So, solution providers really just like SalesChain and GreatAmerica using the integration for submitting credit applications will realize a significant runtime advantage over maybe emailing in or calling in any of the applications. So, our integration enables users to enter the credit application information directly into our booking system, which eliminates the entire idea of having a middleman that will enter system information in two or three different systems just to get the application to GreatAmerica.

It expedites the process and really, truly leads to a faster turn time once the application hits our system, you’ll be able to track it with regular updates from GreatAmerica directly in SalesChain.

Matt Szczygiel, SalesChain: After you’ve submitted your credit application, it’s easy to track its status using SalesChain’s Credit Desk. This is a dedicated screen designed with the leasing coordinator in mind. It helps to track and organize credit applications and their statuses across different leasing companies all in one place. This tool also helps users manage and process conditional approvals and declines.

Automated communication tools and workflow notifications are built in to notify the sales team of important actions like conditional approvals or declines.

Robin Fonck, GreatAmerica: So, keep in mind that this does not change the GreatAmerica’s approach to processing or notifying you of the status of a deal. The traditional process that you know and love about GreatAmerica’s approach to financing and communication will remain the same. This truly, just as an additional layer of visibility into the process.

Matt Szczygiel, SalesChain: So is that what makes submitting credit applications through SalesChain really spectacular or is it something else that makes it a little bit easier?

Robin Fonck, GreatAmerica: Well, SalesChain is spectacular anyway, but the added benefit of the integration, being able to take out that middleman truly helps everybody in the process, really achieve the transparency that we need in each of the deals and the communication that we need in each of the deals. So really, over the last several years, SalesChain has really advanced their integrations with GreatAmerica.

Personally, I’ve been incredibly impressed with your support team. SalesChain has always been very responsive with problem solving and customer service questions. Truly, this partnership makes it easier to do business together, and it helps bring as many possible integration solutions as possible to our end users.

Matt Szczygiel, SalesChain: Well, Robin, thank you very much for your time today. We really appreciate your contributions, your insight, your genius. Obviously, we love GreatAmerica, too, and it’s been very easy working with you as partners. So, thanks again for your time.

If you have any additional questions about the credit application submittal process, please feel free to contact our support desk at 203-262-1611. One of our Help Desk experts would be happy to assist you with your questions. You can also email us at support@saleschain.com. Be sure to subscribe to this channel so that you don’t miss any other helpful tutorials like this one.

And if this helped you with the credit app submittal process, give it a light down below. Please be sure to check out GreatAmerica Financial Services at their website. GreatAmerica.com and until next time, have a great rest of your day.