The form itself is relatively straight forwards and you should complete it naturally as you would any other form, however it’s worth keeping a few things in mind.
The form is split into 6 sections:
1. About the loan
2. About the property
3. About the applicant
4. About the applicant's income
Select any income types your client has and you will see the available income fields you can complete.
5. About the applicants debts
Select any types of debt your client has and you will be able to document the clients situation.
6. About the applicants expenditure
Complete any mandatory fields (required) and any optional expenditure items the customer has. Many lenders will ignore these fields as they use ONS data but this is not the case for all lenders so completing these will ensure the greatest level of accuracy.
What we do with your inputs
Some lenders' own calculators are very short and seem simple, whilst others are a lot more detailed.
Our form is simple to complete but is designed to allow you to accurately capture your clients situation in detail.
This has two benefits.
The first is that this enables us to complete the vast majority of lenders calculators to a very high level of accuracy.
Secondly, it allows us to work with lenders and capture only the incomes that they accept and ignore the ones they don’t which is often unclear when completing the lenders own calculators.
That all said there are a couple of things to keep in mind.
Introducing 'Assumptions' and 'Ignored' Fields
Whilst our form is detailed we cannot possibly catch every unique question a lender asks. For example, if a lender asks if your customer banks with them we won’t have that question on our form. In this scenario we will make an ‘Assumption’ and take a best guess at the answer - in this case we would assume ‘No’.
Due to the level of detail we capture on our form there are times when there is simply nowhere on a lenders form to pass the information to. For example, we ask you to complete if it's a ‘Purchase or Remortgage’ but if the lender does not ask this then we simply cannot pass it through and the lender essentially ignores that fact. We call these ‘Ignored Fields’.
Don’t worry we’ll tell you when we’ve made an assumption and what fields the lender has effectively ignored in the results section. We’ll revisit Assumptions and Ignored fields in the ‘Understanding the results’ tutorial.
The most important thing to remember is that the accuracy of the results returned from lenders is dependent upon the level of detail you input to this form.
Top tips:
Check if the income field is MONTHLY or ANNUALLY
The more you complete the greater the accuracy of results
Make sure you include joint dependents against only one applicant
If you don’t know the postcode use one closeby