Run a loan sale or transfer as a deal, stage by stage

Selling a pool of loans, transferring servicing rights, or packaging loans into a security all follow the same arc. You assemble a population, prove which loans qualify, put the population in front of buyers, and then move the loans that sold. In QBO, each population is a deal, and each loan in it is a deal loan.

In this walkthrough you set up a three-stage deal life cycle (Preparation, Bidding, and Execution), load a loan population into a deal, record eligibility loan by loan, and convert the deal from one stage to the next. Each conversion keeps the earlier stage as a snapshot, so you can always see what the population looked like before bidding opened, and go back to it.

Who it’s for

Power users who set up capital markets, servicing transfer, or due diligence work in QBO. The day-to-day steps (loading loans, marking eligibility, converting) are for analysts and deal managers.

Prerequisites

• Permission to edit process templates and workflow templates, and to create linked objects (Rules > Linked Objects).
• Loans already in QBO, or a loan tape you can import.
• The seller and buyer organizations set up as organizations in QBO.

Building blocks used

• Cases: a deal is a kind of process, so it has a process template, a status, and the workflows that template starts
• Workflow: the work that has to happen at each stage
• Imports: loading a loan tape into a deal
• Contacts: seller and buyer organizations, and the labels that qualify them
• Rules: linked records, which define the allowed stage conversions
• Security: partner (extranet) access for the seller and buyer

How deals are structured

Record	What it holds
Deal	The population under consideration: name, template, status, type, Offering, Pool, Purchase Price, Purchase Percent, Effective and Expires dates, the Seller and Buyer organizations, and a seller contact and buyer contact. A deal can point to a parent deal, which ties related deals together.
Deal loan	One loan’s membership in one deal: the Loan, Seller Loan #, Buyer Loan #, Loan Value, status, type, and eligibility (Eligible Date and Eligible Reason, or Ineligible Date and Ineligible Reason).
Loan	The loan itself. A loan can belong to many deals over its life, one deal loan for each.

Both deals and deal loans accept extra fields: use New Parameter on the edit form to add whatever your model needs, such as a bid-tape value or a diligence score. QBO stores them with the record.

Steps

1. Qualify the seller and buyer organizations

The deal form’s Seller and Buyer fields only offer organizations that carry the right label:

• Label sellers Deal Seller Organizations.
• Label buyers Deal Buyer Organizations.

This keeps the pick list to counterparties you’ve actually onboarded. See Collections: teams, lists, and labels.

2. Create a process template for each stage

Each stage has its own requirements, so give each its own process template that applies to deals:

Template	What happens at this stage	Typical workflow
Preparation	Due diligence on the loan population, to confirm each loan is eligible for sale or transfer	Diligence tasks, document review, exception follow-up
Bidding	The population is presented to potential investors	Bid-tape generation, investor notices, bid tracking
Execution	The deal has sold, and the buyer must transfer or onboard the loans	Transfer letters, data delivery, onboarding checks

Attach each stage’s workflow to its template, as you would for any process. See Choosing the workflow.

3. Link the stages in order

A deal can only convert to the templates its current template is linked to. Open Rules > Linked Objects and create one link for each allowed move, with the current stage as the Primary record and the next stage as the Linked record (both are process templates):

Primary	Linked
Preparation	Bidding
Bidding	Execution

You can add more links for other paths, for example from Bidding back to a second Preparation round when a population is re-cut.

4. Create the deal and load its loans

1. Create a deal with the Preparation template. Fill in the offering, pool, seller, buyer, and dates you know.
2. Drag the loan tape onto the deal’s summary page. QBO imports it with an import template that applies to deals, creating a deal loan for each row. See Imports for building the template.
3. Check the deal loans list: each row should show its loan, seller loan number, and value.

5. Record eligibility as diligence finds it

Open a deal loan’s Eligibility form and pick an Eligible Reason or an Ineligible Reason. Choosing one clears the other and stamps the matching date, so a loan is never both eligible and ineligible. The form also narrows the Status choices: an eligible loan gets an open status, and an ineligible loan a final or hold status. Set up deal loan statuses with that in mind, for example Active, On Hold, and Excluded.

Define the reasons your diligence uses as custom status lists named DealLoan.EligibleReason and DealLoan.IneligibleReason. Specific reasons (such as Missing collateral file or Outside investor guidelines) make the ineligible population easy to report on and easy to cure.

Tip

Run eligibility checks as workflow steps or rules on the Preparation workflow, and keep the Eligibility form for the judgment calls. Automated checks set the reason the same way a person would.

6. Convert the deal to the next stage

When diligence is done, open the deal and choose Edit > Convert to Bidding. QBO:

1. Creates a new deal with the Bidding template, copying the original’s name, offering, pool, seller, buyer, and their contacts. The new deal’s parent is the original.
2. Copies every deal loan, including eligibility, values, and extra fields, to the new deal.
3. Sets the original deal’s status to Converted and the new deal’s to Active.
4. Starts the workflows defined for the Bidding template.
5. Opens the new deal’s summary page.

The Convert to option lists only templates linked to the current one, and hides a target if the deal already has an open (not final) converted copy on that template, so a deal can’t be converted to the same stage twice by accident.

Repeat from Bidding to Execution once the deal sells.

Note

Conversion copies the population; it doesn’t move it. Eligibility changes you make on the Bidding deal don’t alter the Preparation snapshot. To roll back, return to the earlier deal, which still holds the population as it stood.

7. Give the seller and buyer access

Deals and deal loans take part in row-level partner security. Grant the seller’s and buyer’s users access to the deal and they can review and update deal loans (diligence findings, values, eligibility) on that deal and nothing else. See Group access and extranet security.

The result

Every loan sale or transfer is a chain of deals, one per stage, each with its own workflow and its own frozen population. The Related Deals tab on any deal shows the whole chain, from the first Preparation round to Execution. Analysts can answer “which loans dropped out between diligence and bidding, and why?” by comparing two deals, rather than reconstructing it from spreadsheets.

Next steps

• Add a worklist for ineligible loans, so cures are owned and measured.
• Build a report that compares deal loans across the deals in a chain.
• See how QBO supports the rest of the servicing life cycle on Mortgage servicing.