Everything you ask a client for on a deal hangs off one intake. The intake is the application itself, and every later ask for a document or a signature is a follow-up written against it. Once you can see that shape, the buttons on a deal stop looking like a row of equal options.
The Application and the Requests That Follow
The intake is what you send first. Your client fills in the application themselves, and the deal tab says so before anything has been sent: Nothing sent to this borrower yet. Use Send intake to start it.
After the intake lands, documents and signatures are asked for against it. The intake always leads the list and requests follow in the order you sent them, because they are not peers.
One Link Per Applicant
A client's link opens one session, so an item has to be written to the session that person actually holds. BrokerPlus decides that for you: a live request wins, and where there is none the ask goes to the submitted intake, which is still the link they hold.
An intake that has not been submitted yet cannot take an ask. If you request something anyway, it is held against that intake and released once they submit, rather than sending them back into a form that has no upload step.
Each applicant an ask reaches gets their own fresh link, and it lands on the Requests tab so the thing they were emailed about is the thing in front of them.
Where a Request Lives on a Deal
On the deal, the intake sits behind See intake answers until you ask something against it. From then on it holds this deal's documents and appears beside the request sessions, labelled Intake.
One live request runs per deal at a time, so the same client is never asked for the same documents twice. A request you have approved is finished and no longer blocks a new one.
What a Round Is
Each time you send, you open a round. The email lists only what that round asks for; anything already outstanding stays outstanding but is not repeated, because telling someone again about a document you asked for last week reads as if you lost it.
When you ask for a replacement of a file already on the deal, the round names the file rather than the item, so a client with three pay stubs on file knows which one to send again.
What You Set Up Once
Client Requests holds the reusable parts. Package templates is what you can ask a borrower for, Message templates is the email they get around it, and Manage automations covers the asks that go out without you.
What to Do Next
- Send a Client Request for Documents to make your first ask on a live deal.
- Build a Reusable Request Template so the same package goes out every time.
- What Your Client Sees before you send anything to a real borrower.