Customer stories


Home Solution Mortgage Company

Home Solution Mortgage Company takes advantage of the ease of development in FileMaker Pro 8 to build solutions that help its clients

Located in Las Vegas, Nevada, Home Solution helps homebuyers and homeowners negotiate major financial hurdles by arranging mortgages, helping to manage credit, and dealing with difficult credit histories. It's a small company, but an active one – and keeps its extensive client files carefully organized with powerful FileMaker Pro 8 database solutions.


Business Challenge

Matters of home financing and credit mean that a great deal of data passes through many hands and many processes. Credit histories, references, facts, figures and documentation all tend to pile up – but at the same time, such information needs to be immediately available for reference. When a company operates with a small, multi-tasking staff, efficient data management becomes even more critical. "Once our clients are in our database, we have to track a number of bits of information about them," comments Home Solution’s lead developer, Brian Hightower. "We work with our clients over a period of months, sometimes years. This requires follow-up and tracking. Storing credit reports is a big part of what we do, and we wanted a way to automate as much of the importing and parsing of the reports as possible. Setting up a system capable of tracking data and reminding us to follow up is an absolute necessity."


Successful Solution

Brian turned to FileMaker Pro in 2003, recognizing it offered the best value for both time and money. "We looked at 3 programs before beginning our in-house solution," he relates. "We actually began a version of our database in another program, and it took us 3 months to get a working framework. I created twice as much power and usability in FileMaker Pro within a week."

Now, the company operates three basic FileMaker Pro databases. The primary in-house client database contains 31 tables with nearly 330,000 records, and incorporates two more files containing vendor data. This system is supplemented by additional, specialized Calendar and Time Tracking databases designed by Cleveland Consulting (Time Tracking is an add-on designed to work with FileMaker Pro 8).

The upgrade to FileMaker Pro 8 proceeded without a hitch – in fact, Brian finds that he can use 7 and 8 simultaneously, without need for any further integration.


"Contact management is a big part of our solution, and the ability to customize everything we want makes it impossible to compare FileMaker Pro 8 to other solutions. They're unusable compared to what we have available to us now."

Brian Hightower, Lead Developer, Home Solution


Customer Benefits

In any business setting, time is money. But this is even more so when a firm is handling time-sensitive, complex tasks with a staff of only 7. "We've saved many hours in programming and training because of the new features in FileMaker Pro 8," Brian declares. "Tool Tips, the tabbed interface, the Find and Sort improvement in speed, and my favorite, Development Tools, have all improved my results and quickened my development times. For my users, Tool Tips save hours of training time, and the tabbed dialogs take my layouts to a new level of professionalism."

Contact management is an important part of the workday at Home Solution, and here again Brian finds that FileMaker Pro 8 goes from strength to strength. "Contact management is a big part of our solution," he continues, "and the ability to customize everything we want makes it impossible to compare FileMaker Pro 8 to other solutions. They're unusable compared to what we have available to us now."

Brian stresses that no one on his team is a hard-core, code-crunching developer – but FileMaker Pro 8 remains user-friendly. "We're not programmers," he underlines, "but we're creative scripters. The new Set Variable functions make script design more powerful and portable for use, and I can cut down the number of scripts that have similar steps by using variables. And the ability to copy and paste scripts steps between scripts is most important!"

Improved efficiency in development and daily use make a difference behind the scenes at Home Solution, but they also matter where it counts most. "Because we can work faster and more accurately," Brian concludes, "our customers get better service."



Contact information

Contact Info for Customer:

Daron Ruiz
Lead Developer
Home Solution
702-395-7888
druiz@homesolution.com


Filemaker Contact:

Kevin Mallon
Public Relations Manager
FileMaker Inc.
408-987-7227
kevin_mallon@filemaker.com
http://www.filemaker.com


Overview
  • Mortgage company providing loan and credit-management services to clients
  • Based in Las Vegas, NV
  • Approximately 8 employees
Industry
  • Finance/Banking
Solutions
  • FileMaker Pro contact management, client tracking, and vendor tracking systems
Benefits
  • Increased ease of development in FileMaker Pro 8 sharply reduces time needed to create and maintain database solutions.
  • Efficient, automated storage of essential client data, including information imported from outside documents.
  • Enhanced scripting and layout functions facilitate creation of customized systems.