Land of Zoho Creator

In this post I describe how a small Real Estate Law firm improved they way they do their work considerably when the started using Zoho Creator.

This firm helps their customers with the legal work associated with purchasing or selling properties. The process (i.e. Property Closings) involves among others, keeping track of the status, key participants (i.e. Client, Loan Officer, Attorney for the other side) and whether or not the required information has been obtained in order to complete the transaction.  Preferably, all the information must be in one place. Lastly, it is important for anyone in the firm to have access to this information, regardless of their location.

They had different systems in place for managing their contacts and keeping track of the Closings and found they were spending too much time retyping contact details in their tracking systems, forgetting about sending emails automatically when a milestone had been reached and they had no way of accessing the information while away from their office.

Let’s take a closer look. The application includes two main Forms (New Closing, New Contact) and three different views (View Closings, View Contacts, Client Details, and specifically:

•  Contact Form that includes the details of the main person as well as a related contact. In the case of the Client, the related contact is always the Spouse; for the Loan Officer, the Processor is always the related contact; therefore that relationship is automatically populated. In this context, the Contact Category (i.e. Client, Attorney, Loan Officer) is required.
• Closings Form that contains all the information that must be tracked. Each Closing record actually points to three different contacts (i.e. Client, Attorney Other Side and Loan Officer). Only the names of people in each specific category are displayed as options, hence the need for having a category for each contact.
• Closing View, showing (in a Summary View) all the details of of the Closing.  It is worth noting if the user needs to find the details of any of the people listed in the Closing, he or she can do so by clicking the hyperlink (Client, Attorney or Lender details), which will open a new window with their contact information.

Aside from this, there’s a function that sends a boiler plate email automatically at different times during the process and a couple more bells and whistles, but the basics are shown here. And as you can probably tell from my previous post, the information needs of this entity with regards to contacts clearly differs from what one would expect.

If there is any interest in understanding “what’s under the hood” of this application, vote below and I’ll share the tips and tricks with you.