Reports a Funding Company Owner Should Read Weekly
Four reports, one hour on a Monday morning. What to look at, what to ignore, and the questions each number should send you to ask.
Owners of funding companies tend to live in one of two extremes. Some look at almost nothing beyond the bank balance and the funded list, and find out about problems when a top broker resigns or a lender stops replying. Others drown in dashboards, refreshing numbers all day without changing a single decision.
There is a middle path. A short, fixed set of reports, read at the same time every week, tells you most of what you need to know about the health of the business. The goal is not to monitor brokers minute by minute. It is to spot trends early enough to do something about them.
Here are the four reports worth an hour of your Monday, what each is really telling you, and the follow-up questions that turn a number into a decision.
Pre-flight summary
- Reports are only as honest as the data underneath; automate capture first.
- Split funded volume into new and renewal business to see what is really happening.
- Pipeline age by stage is the best early warning of next month's volume.
- Read broker activity alongside outcomes, and use it to coach rather than rank.
- Watch lender concentration and response times every week.
Leg 01Before the reports: make sure the data is honest
Every report below depends on brokers recording what actually happens. If calls are made from personal phones, stages are updated in bulk on Friday afternoon, or funded deals are missing their lender and amount, your reports will describe a business that does not exist.
The most reliable fix is to capture activity automatically wherever possible: calls logged to the deal by the dialer, lender replies threaded onto the deal, funded amounts and payouts recorded on the same ledger. Manual entry should be the exception. Fix this first, or the rest of this guide is guesswork.
In FundPilot, calls from the built-in dialer, lender replies from batch submissions and broker payouts on the syndication and commissions ledger all land on the deal record, which gives your weekly numbers a more trustworthy base than hand-kept spreadsheets.
Leg 02Report one: funded volume, and what sits behind it
Funded volume is the number everyone watches, and on its own it is a lagging indicator. By the time it drops, the cause happened weeks ago. Read it, but always alongside its breakdown.
Look at funded volume by week over the last quarter, split between new merchants and renewals. Say total volume looks flat, but renewals have quietly grown while new business has shrunk. That is a very different situation from steady growth on both sides: your lead flow or conversion may be weakening, and your renewal book is masking it.
- Funded count and total funded amount by week
- New merchants versus renewals
- Average deal size, and whether it is drifting
- Commission earned versus commission paid out to brokers
Leg 03Report two: pipeline health by stage
Pipeline health is your leading indicator. It shows what funded volume will look like in a few weeks. The useful view is not the total value of the pipeline, which is easily inflated by optimistic brokers, but how many deals sit in each stage and how long they have been there.
Watch for pile-ups. If deals are stacking up in documents requested, the bottleneck is collection, and a portal or better follow-up may help. If they are stacking up after submission, look at your lender relationships or the quality of files going out. A stage where deals sit for weeks without activity usually means they are dead and nobody has said so.
Custom pipeline stages help here, because they let the stages reflect how your shop actually works rather than a generic sales funnel.
Funded volume tells you how last month went. Pipeline age tells you how next month will go.
Leg 04Report three: broker productivity, read carefully
Broker activity reports are useful and easily misused. Call counts and talk time show effort, not results, and ranking brokers purely by dials encourages short, low-quality calls. Read activity alongside outcomes.
For each broker, look at a small set of measures together: conversations held, applications started, files submitted, deals funded. The ratios between them are where the coaching opportunities are. A broker with plenty of conversations but few applications may need help with the ask. One with many submissions but few fundings may be sending weak files, which also damages your standing with lenders.
Use the report to choose which recorded calls to listen to, not to hand out rankings. Searchable transcripts make it easier to find the conversations where a file stalled.
Leg 05Report four: lender mix and response
Concentration risk is easy to miss. If one lender funds a large share of your deals, a change in their guidelines or appetite can hit your volume overnight. Your weekly lender view should show where files were submitted, which lenders replied, how quickly, with what offers, and which ones funded.
This also shows you where relationships are drifting. A lender who used to reply within a day and now takes three, or who has stopped making offers on files that previously fit, deserves a phone call. Matching files to lender guidelines more carefully, rather than sending every file everywhere, tends to improve response over time.
Leg 06Making the hour count
Treat the review as a routine with a short output, not a reading exercise.
- Read the four reports in the same order every week.
- Write down no more than three things that changed meaningfully.
- For each, name one question to answer and one person to ask.
- Bring one pipeline or productivity observation to the team huddle.
- Check last week's three items and note whether anything moved.
Leg 07Asking questions instead of building reports
Not every question deserves a permanent report. Many are one-off: which renewals are coming due this month, which merchants went quiet after receiving an offer, which deals a departing broker still has open. FundPilot's AI assistant answers questions like these from live CRM data, so you can ask in plain English and then open the deals it points to, rather than waiting for someone to build a spreadsheet.
Questions from the floor
Should brokers see the same reports as owners?
Usually not all of them. Brokers benefit from seeing their own pipeline and activity, and sometimes team-level totals. Commission ledgers, lender economics and other brokers' numbers are often best limited to owners and managers. Role-based access lets each person see what is useful for their job without exposing information they do not need.
How often should these reports be reviewed?
Weekly is a good rhythm for owners, because it is frequent enough to catch trends and infrequent enough to avoid reacting to daily noise. Managers will look at pipeline and activity more often, sometimes daily during a huddle. A monthly look at longer trends, such as renewal rates and lender mix over a quarter, adds useful perspective.
What if our numbers suddenly drop?
Start with the data before the business. Check whether brokers stopped logging something, whether a stage was renamed, or whether deals were moved in bulk. If the data holds up, trace back through the stages to find where deals stopped moving. A drop in funded volume usually shows up earlier as a pile-up somewhere in the pipeline.
General information only — not legal, tax or financial advice. Rules for telemarketing, texting, recording, disclosures and data retention vary and change; confirm current requirements with qualified counsel.
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