Google Sheets as a CRM for loan brokers

Plenty of brokers fund their first hundred deals out of a spreadsheet and a good email folder. It is free, everyone knows how to use it, and you can change the columns in a minute. If you place a handful of deals a month, work alone or with one partner, and send every submission yourself, a well-built sheet is enough. The trouble starts when the sheet is laid out like a contact list. Brokerage work is about deals, the lenders they went to, and the money that came back, so the sheet should be too.

Keep one row per thing, and connect tabs with an ID rather than by retyping names. A merchant's name will be spelled three different ways by the end of the month; a deal ID will not.

The Lenders tab is the one most brokers skip, and it is the one that saves the most time. When each lender's box is written down in columns, you can filter for the lenders a deal fits instead of remembering them. That is the manual version of lender matching.

A few calculated columns turn the sheet from a list into something you can run the business from. These work the same in Google Sheets and Excel; adjust the column letters to your layout.

Days since last touch (Leads):   =TODAY() - L2
Stale lead flag (Leads):         =IF(TODAY() - L2 > 3, "CALL", "")
Payback (Funded):                =D2 * factor_rate
Paid-in % (Funded):              =paid_to_date / payback
Commission still owed (Funded):  =commission_expected - commission_received
Lenders that fit (Deals):        =FILTER(Lenders!A:B, Lenders!D:D <= F2, Lenders!F:F >= positions)

Add a filter view per rep (Data, then Filter views in Google Sheets) so each person sees their own leads without sorting the shared sheet out from under everyone else. If your offers are factor-rate advances, the factor rate calculator and the ISO commission calculator show the math the formulas above are standing in for.

• Two people edit at once. Sorts and filters collide, rows get pasted over, and the version history is the only audit trail.
• Everyone sees everything. A sheet cannot show a rep only their own leads. Anyone with the link can copy your whole book of business.
• Sensitive data sits in plain cells. SSNs, dates of birth, bank account numbers and the statements themselves should not live in a shared spreadsheet or a shared drive folder.
• Nothing reminds you. A follow-up date in a column does nothing on its own. Leads go cold because nobody sorted by the right column that day.
• Lender criteria drift. Lenders change their box. The sheet keeps matching against last quarter's rules unless someone updates it.
• Commissions get lost. Without a running list of expected versus received, a short or missing commission payment is easy to miss for months.

Move when one of these is true, not when the sheet becomes unbearable, because by then it usually holds a few months of lost follow-ups:

• You hire your first rep who is not a partner, and you need them to see only their own leads.
• You buy leads in volume and need to know which source actually funds. See MCA leads: types, vendors and how to work them.
• You submit to more than ten lenders and keep re-checking who takes what.
• You cannot say, today, which commissions lenders still owe you.
• Someone other than you needs the numbers: a partner, an investor or an accountant.

The layout above is also an import plan. Export each tab as CSV or keep it as XLSX, then bring it in tab by tab: leads first, then lenders, then open deals. In our CRM you map each column to a field once, duplicates are skipped before anything is created, and the mapping saves as a preset for the next file. We import your data with you, and the migration guide covers what to clean first.

What the sheet could not do comes with the move: agents limited to their own leads, sensitive fields encrypted, an audit log of every change, and the lender, submission and commission tabs as real records. Plans start at $69 per user per month, with the $999 setup fee waived during our introductory offer.