Top 10 tips for an efficient closing department - Tip 1: Documents at your fingertips

How does your closing department stack up against the best in the country ? How do you get each person in your closing department to close more transactions ? This question matters because a closing / accounting person costs on average, $60,000 per year.

In 3 different studies, AccountTECH closing department users process more than 5 closings in the same amount of time it takes a Quickbooks user to close a deal. But even among AccountTECH clients, there is variation in how many transactions different users close in a month. It’s the combination of AccountTECH software AND efficient practices that yields the best results.

In this series of 10 tips, we will countdown the production numbers for the top 10 closers in America. The 10th place finalist’s production will be revealed at the end of this article.

In our interviews, all of the Top 10 closing departments talked about handling transaction documents. While different companies use different Transaction management software programs, all of the Top 10 have some way of having the documents from the closings right at their fingertips. The highest producers keep copies of the closing documents right in darwin - right in the property they are closing. Other companies use dotLoop or SkySlope and they keep those programs open all day. Then whenever they need to, they search and lookup the documents from their TC software. Two of the Top 10 closers get paper copies of the closing documents, in a folder, placed on their desk. If they need a transaction document, they just find the document print-out in the property folder.

None of the Top 10 closers ever has to go looking for transaction documents they need to do their work. The closers that work with paper files were at the bottom of the Top 10 list, in part, because they need to take time to file the paper files after they are finished with the folders.

Tip #1 takeaway:  Have the transaction documents at the closer’s fingertips.  Don’t make closers in the accounting department have to waste any time looking for the documents containing numbers they need to confirm to correctly close a transaction.

From our recent study, #10 was Eileen from Sotheby’s in New York. Eileen personally closes 320 transactions each month. While very impressive, the numbers for the Top 3 finalists are much higher. Read each of the 10 tips in this series to the numbers for the winner of our most productive closer in America.

sample - property documents inside a transaction record



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