Encompass Audit - What, Who, When, How and Best Practices

An Encompass Audit is a comprehensive review of all settings elements and diagnostics logs. By conducting an Encompass Audit, you can determine the effectiveness of your efforts, identify areas where your configuration may be lacking, and gain valuable insights that can enhance your business's return on investment.

We’re here to walk you through the concept of an Encompass Audit, how to do it, and highlight best practices so you can make data-driven decisions to drive growth in your business and elevate your Loan Origination System to optimize your ROI.

What is an Encompass Audit?

An Encompass audit involves thoroughly assessing your Loan Origination System to pinpoint strengths and weaknesses. It can act as a guiding light to improve the effectiveness and performance of Encompass by analyzing every aspect of your configuration.  An encompass audit can answer important questions like:

• Is your overall configuration effective?

• What is working well with your access rights?

• What isn’t working well with your access rights?

• Are you using the correct calculations to drive data?

• Are you missing out on capabilities that your competitors are leveraging?

Who Should Perform an Encompass Audit?

Let’s face it - it’s hard to find time to step back and assess the success of your Encompass configuration due to a host of competing priorities, fire drills and day-to-day responsibilities. It’s also helpful to get an outside, objective, and experienced perspective. This is often why the best way to obtain an objective encompass audit is to use a third party. When a third-party partner conducts an encompass audit, it is known as an external Encompass audit.

External Encompass audits can be helpful for several reasons:

1. Third-party involvement helps provide impartial assessments, evaluations and solutions.

2. Outside perspective can help identify blind spots internally and potentially validate correct assumptions.

3. A third party will often bring fresh enhancement ideas and strategies along with recommendations for actionable insights.

4. Conducting an audit requires expertise and experience. External expertise helps provide a comprehensive expertise and specialized knowledge to improve your Loan Origination System and overall performance.

5. If you don’t have the time and resources to perform an internal Encompass audit, a third-party can come in and do the heavy lifting for you.

When Should You Conduct an Encompass Audit?

Mortgage Technology is moving at the speed of light these days with Service Automations, Automated Conditioning, and Workflow Automations at our fingertips in Encompass Web Version. You want to make sure that your Encompass environment is delivering results because it is being put in front of your loan manufacturing experts every hour of every day. 

Trying to navigate the various technologies available for enhancing your Loan Origination System can be a cumbersome and daunting task. With an Encompass audit, you can identify ways to streamline your efforts so they are focused on the most effective avenues with a refined approach that can help you get the results you want from your Loan Origination System.  

What’s more,  if you're eager to dive deeper into understanding your configuration—the personas, user insights, and diagnostics—utilizing an Encompass audit, complete with persona summaries and user analysis, can provide invaluable insights. 

Maybe you want to maximize your Loan Origination System with a tight budget? An Encompass Audit offers clarity on where your dollars can make the greatest impact.

In general, we advise our clients to conduct Encompass audits regularly, ideally on an annual basis or even every six months. This proactive approach ensures your Loan Origination System remains consistently efficient with fresh enhancements that get you the best results for your business.

What to Do with Your Audit Results

At this point in the Encompass audit process, you’ll have powerful information in your hands. This information has the power to optimize your Loan Origination System, drive growth, and deliver results. These actionable insights remove much of the guesswork, guiding the creation of an optimized Loan Origination System for the current state of your Encompass instance. 

Here’s an example that could be applicable to any company: if a particular business rule isn't firing when a field is blank, updating the rule to a remove null errors could be a key takeaway. Identifying missed data flows allows you to integrate them into your future state.

Your audit results put you in the driver’s seat to make informed decisions about the direction of your Loan Origination System. So if you’re wondering what to do with your audit results, it’s as simple as this: use them to accelerate your Loan Origination System's scalability.

How Often Should You Conduct an Encompass Audit?

Encompass audits provide valuable insights into how configurations are performing, but as we explained earlier, trends are moving faster than ever. An Encompass audit can help to guide Encompass configuration for current and  future trends. The quicker you identify what works and what doesn't, the faster you can optimize your Loan Origination System to bring in the results you want. 

Encompass audits are usually conducted annually, although some companies or industries may benefit from conducting Encompass audits at six-month intervals. The frequency may depend on factors like budget and hiring. Conducting more frequent audits ensures the availability of up-to-date information, which can act as a guide for optimized Encompass decision-making throughout the year.