Scratchpad vs Dooly for an Asset-Based Lender's Origination Pipeline

Every new origination should carry a tracked referral source from day one, not reconstructed later when it is time to calculate a referral fee. A bulk view across all originations, grouped by referral source, is a useful periodic check on which relationships are actually producing deals and which have gone quiet, which matters because referral relationships need occasional maintenance calls of their own to stay warm, and it is easy to lose track of which sources need that attention without a clear view across the whole book.

Asset-based lending underwriting can run for months, involving field exams, collateral appraisals, and multiple rounds of financial due diligence with the borrower's CFO. A call with the borrower's CFO midway through that process often surfaces a detail that changes the deal, a covenant the borrower wants adjusted, a change in their revolver usage, or a timing constraint on when they need funding. Losing that detail between the call and the credit committee memo is a real risk on a deal this long, and it is the kind of thing call capture is built to prevent.

A closed facility is not the end of the relationship, it is the start of ongoing covenant monitoring and an eventual renewal or renegotiation. Tracking covenant compliance and upcoming renewal dates as their own pipeline, distinct from new originations, keeps a portfolio manager from discovering a covenant breach or a lapsed renewal window only when the borrower brings it up, which is a worse position for the lender than catching it proactively.

If the recurring problem is referral sources going quiet without anyone noticing, or covenant renewal dates slipping past without a proactive check-in, that is a bulk-review problem, and Scratchpad's grid view is the more direct fit for scanning a portfolio regularly. If the recurring problem is losing specific underwriting detail from a borrower CFO call between the conversation and the credit memo, that is a call-capture problem, and Dooly is the more direct fit. Most specialty lenders eventually need both, given how much of the business runs on both referral relationships and long, detail-heavy underwriting calls.

Weigh these points when choosing between the two tools:

• Check whether referral sources are tagged on every origination at intake, since attribution drives referral fees.
• Look for details lost between a borrower CFO call and the credit committee memo, which points toward call capture.
• Decide whether a bulk view of originations grouped by referral source would reveal relationships that have gone quiet.
• Confirm covenant compliance and renewal dates are tracked as their own pipeline after a facility closes.

Referral fee terms vary by source and sometimes by deal, and if that arrangement is not recorded when the origination is first logged, calculating it correctly months later at closing becomes guesswork. A required field for the agreed referral fee terms, entered at intake rather than reconstructed at closing, prevents a dispute with a referral source who brought real business and deserves to be paid accurately and on time.

Neither platform performs the actual credit analysis or covenant calculation, both still depend on financial data pulled from the borrower's own reporting. What either tool can do is make sure the borrower's next reporting deadline and the portfolio manager's next required review are both visible and tracked, so the underlying credit work happens on schedule rather than being discovered late because nobody was prompted to look at a given facility.

A single portfolio manager can reasonably track a handful of facilities from memory, but that stops scaling well past a dozen or so, particularly once renewal dates and reporting deadlines start overlapping across the book. That growth point is usually when a specialty lender moves from an ad hoc tracking habit toward a tool that can scan the whole portfolio at once for upcoming deadlines, rather than relying on any one person remembering which facility needs attention next, which becomes a real, concrete risk the moment that person is out sick, on vacation, or leaves the role entirely.

A field exam, where an outside examiner physically verifies collateral like inventory or receivables, adds its own scheduling dependency to an already long underwriting cycle, and a delayed exam can quietly push back a closing date that everyone else on the deal still believes is on track. Track the field exam as its own milestone with its own expected completion date, rather than folding it into a generic underwriting stage, so a slipping exam schedule surfaces early enough to reset expectations with the borrower before it becomes a surprise.