FloQast vs. AuditBoard for Commercial Debt and Capital Advisory Firms

A signed term sheet or a rate lock doesn't guarantee a deal will actually close, since financing falls through for reasons entirely outside the broker's control right up until funding. Recognize the origination fee once the loan closes and funds, not when the term sheet is signed, and reconcile any fee recognized before closing as an exception requiring a documented reason, not the default practice.

A split between the originating broker, a referral source, and the firm itself often depends on loan size, product type, and whether the deal came through a house account or an individual broker's own relationship, which means the split formula isn't uniform across every closed loan. Reconcile each closed loan's split against its specific commission agreement before payout, the same discipline a real estate brokerage applies to its own splits, rather than assuming a standard formula applies to every deal.

A rate lock secured for a client ties the firm to specific terms for a defined window, and if the deal doesn't close within that window, the lock can expire or require renegotiation at different terms, which affects the eventual fee. Track locked deals against their expiration dates the same way you'd track any account with a hard deadline, and reconcile any lock that's approaching expiration before it becomes a client relationship problem instead of an accounting footnote.

Fee recognition timing, broker split calculations, and rate lock tracking are recurring reconciliations that repeat the same way on every closed loan, which is exactly FloQast's model: a named preparer and reviewer per reconciliation, with a variance that stays visible until it's explained, instead of a controller reconstructing each closed deal's math from separate files.

A warehouse lender, an institutional capital source, or a buyer evaluating the firm increasingly wants documented evidence that fee recognition and split calculations are formally reviewed, not just that the numbers reconcile after the fact. AuditBoard holds that evidence: who reviewed each closed deal's fee and split calculation, on what cadence, and against what documentation.

• If fee recognition timing and broker split reconciliations are the recurring mess at close, start with FloQast.
• If a warehouse lender, capital source, or buyer's diligence process has started asking for documented review evidence, bring in AuditBoard.
• If rate locks aren't tracked against their expiration dates in a formal system, fix that specifically first, since a missed expiration is a client and revenue risk no reconciliation tool prevents on its own.

Say a $6 million refinance gets a signed term sheet in March, a rate lock in April, and funds in June after an appraisal delay pushes the closing back twice. Recognizing the fee in March, when the term sheet was signed, would overstate that quarter's revenue on a deal that hadn't actually closed yet and still carried real execution risk from the appraisal delay alone. Recognizing it in June, once funding is confirmed, ties the fee to the point where the deal is actually done, and the two-month lag between the original lock and the eventual funding date is exactly the kind of timing gap a reconciliation should be tracking throughout, not discovering only at quarter end.

A firm funding loans through a warehouse line before selling them to a permanent investor is carrying debt against inventory that turns over quickly, and the draw balance has to reconcile against the specific loans it's funding at any given moment, not just against a total outstanding figure. Reconcile the warehouse line monthly against the loans currently funded through it, and flag any loan sitting on the line longer than the facility's typical turnaround time, since that's usually the first sign a sale to the permanent investor is stalled somewhere in the process.