Client onboarding
The distance between a signed agreement and a first funding is where deals die.
Written for the operations lead who owns the handover from sales to funding. You have an interested prospect, an underwriter who wants three more things, a legal position that is not perfected yet, and a client who was told they would be funded this week.
FactorFox holds that whole stretch as one record, with every check dated and attached to the party it was run against, and with the gates that must pass before money moves stated in advance rather than discovered on the day.
Why this exists
Onboarding is not slow because people are slow. It is slow because nobody can see the whole of it.
Ask four people in a factoring company what is outstanding on a new client and you will get four confident and different answers, none of which is wrong.
Intake to first funding
Seven stages, each one leaving evidence behind it
This is the sequence the platform runs. Which optional checks appear inside it depends on what your tenant holds contracts for, and the platform tells the operator which those are.
- Intake
The application becomes a party, not a document
Legal name, structure, ownership, the receivable it wants to sell, the debtors it sells to. Entered once, by the client through the portal or by your team, and from that moment it is a record with a history rather than a form in a queue.
- Birth checks
The checks a party is born with run immediately
Creation is the trigger, not a later manual step. Network payment behaviour on the debtors, lien position on the client, sanctions and AML screening on the party, and registration identity where the industry calls for it. Results attach to the party as dated evidence.
- Documents
What arrives is preserved and classified
Financials, tax returns, accounts receivable and payable agings, articles, insurance certificates and the executed agreement. Originals are kept as originals. Anything extracted from them is marked as a derivative of the document it came from.
- Ledger
The client's own books, where they run them
QuickBooks Online and Xero connect on the client's consent, read only, and open receivables arrive structured with external identifiers that make a second sync idempotent. FactorFox never writes to a client ledger. The sync proposes through the intake rail and a person applies it.
- Underwrite
A versioned decision with confidence and coverage stated separately
The run records what it saw, what it could not see, and how confident it is in what it did see. Coverage and confidence are reported as two different things, because a confident answer built on half the data is a different object from a cautious one built on all of it.
- Perfect
The legal position, watched rather than remembered
Registered security interests, notices of assignment and the acknowledgements that come back. In Australia, PPSR search, registration and verification statements with expiry watched. Priority is a position that decays, so it is monitored rather than filed.
- Fund
First schedule, first release, two names on it
The first schedule faces the same verification every later one will. The release faces the gate set. Four eyes applies. Nothing about the first funding is a special path, because special paths are where the exceptions that hurt you get made.
The checks a party is born with
Run at creation, attached as evidence, never quietly refreshed
Which of these are live in your tenant depends on the contracts you hold. The platform states the status of each one on screen instead of hiding the ones you have not bought.
Probity network
AvailableDebtor payment behaviour drawn from the FactorFox network itself. No vendor, no contract, no per check charge, and nothing about your book leaves your tenant.
TaxRock
AvailableFederal and state tax lien position on the client. One computation serves both the intake drawer and the underwriting engine, so the two can never disagree.
AML and sanctions
AvailableScreening at onboarding and daily rescreening afterwards. Results are versioned evidence and are never overwritten by a later run.
Ficoso
AvailableAdditional client side risk assessment at intake, for the files where one source is not enough.
FMCSA
AvailableCarrier and broker registration identity, on the client side and the debtor side. In transportation both sides need looking at.
PPSR
AvailableAustralian registered security interests: search, registration, verification statements, and expiry watched rather than diarised.
Creditsafe
Contract requiredCommercial credit on debtors at the moment a debtor is created. The rail is built and answers not configured until you hold a contract and keys.
Dun and Bradstreet
Contract requiredUnited States client credit at intake, offered where the tenant country qualifies. Same posture: no keys, no silent behaviour.
Bank feed
PlannedNot built. Declared in the underwriting engine as a source that is not wired, which is why covenants depending on controlled collection percentage say they are awaiting a live source.
On the transportation checks, note what is deliberately absent. Operating authority currency, insurance currency and safety scores are captured, never asserted. The gate that would assert them is explicitly forbidden from guessing and says so on screen, because a system that implies it verified a carrier’s insurance when it did not is worse than one that never looked.
Honest configuration
The operator is told what did not happen, by name.
Most software hides what a customer has not paid for. It is a reasonable commercial instinct and it is a bad idea in a lending platform, because the absence of a check is itself a material fact about a decision. An underwriter who believes a lien search ran, when the lien rail has no keys in your tenant, is making a decision on evidence that does not exist.
So every surface degrades honestly. A check without configuration says it is not configured and names what is absent. An underwriting run reports coverage separately from confidence, so a file assessed without a bureau result cannot pass as a fully evidenced one. A covenant that needs a source FactorFox does not hold says it is awaiting a live source and names the source, rather than reporting zero and looking compliant.
This has a second effect that customers tend to notice later. It makes the cost of a contract visible in the place where it matters. When a credit officer sees the same greyed row three times in a week on files they are uncomfortable with, that is a much better argument for buying a bureau feed than anything a salesperson could construct.
A greyed row teaches
An unconfigured check appears in the drawer with its status and the exact configuration that is missing.
The operator learns that the check exists, learns that it did not run, and can say so out loud in a credit meeting. A hidden feature removes all three of those, and replaces them with an assumption.
Gates
What must be true before money moves
A gate states what it proves and whether it can ever be reduced to advice. The ones that protect money cannot.
| Gate | What it proves | Can it be advisory |
|---|---|---|
| Agreement executed | A signed facility exists, with its terms loaded and its clauses available to be quoted as evidence later. | No |
| Party screening clear | AML and sanctions screening returned and was reviewed. Daily rescreening continues afterwards. | No |
| Legal position | The security interest is registered and, where required, notice of assignment has gone out and been acknowledged. | No |
| Bank account established | The account money will be sent to was set up under the human only hold, verified out of band and released by a named person. | No |
| Debtor approved | Each debtor on the first schedule has a credit decision and a limit, with the evidence that produced it attached. | No |
| Schedule verified | The invoices on the first schedule passed document verification, duplicate checks and whatever verification your policy requires. | No |
| Underwriting current | An underwriting run exists, is current against every material event since, and states its coverage as well as its confidence. | No |
| Documents complete | The document checklist for this client class is satisfied, with each item present as an original rather than as a note saying it was seen. | Yes, with a named exception and a reason |
| Ledger connected | The client's accounting system is linked, where your policy asks for it. | Yes, with a named exception and a reason |
| Four eyes on release | Two people. The requester cannot approve their own release, on any surface, including from a phone. | No |
Where a gate permits an exception, the exception is a record: who granted it, what reason they wrote, what it covered, and when it expires. In solo mode an AI counter review is logged where the second officer’s name would sit, and it refuses outright when any underlying fact has changed since the request was raised.
After the first funding
Onboarding does not end. It becomes monitoring.
The reason to do intake this carefully is that every artefact it produces keeps working afterwards.
The underwriting run keeps running
Re underwriting happens on every material event rather than on an annual review date, and each run is versioned immutably beside the last one.
Screening continues daily
A party that was clear at onboarding and never rechecked is a compliance position that expires quietly. Rescreening is daily and the results are versioned evidence.
Priority is watched
Registrations expire. Watching the expiry is the difference between holding a position and believing you hold one.
The debtor set grows
Every new debtor gets the checks a party is born with, on the day it is created, not at the next review.
The covenant pack starts collecting
From the first month, against the default pack modelled on how bank rediscount facilities are actually written. Every surface states that these are FactorFox covenants and not anyone's contract.
The client's first ninety days are visible
Submission rhythm, dilution, debtor concentration and payment velocity all establish the baselines that every later deviation is measured against.
Related
Bring the file that took six weeks.
We will lay it out as FactorFox would have held it, and show you which of those six weeks was work and which was waiting for somebody to find out what was outstanding.