I have just returned from a client who uses CRA Wiz and while visiting I discovered that Wiz apparently has no standard field for identifying refi's and renewals. This means potential double-counting and double-reporting those loans. Are there any Wiz users who can share their experience with respect to this issue and how they deal with this critical data integrity issue? What has your bank done to identify refi's and renewals, how are they flagged and how do refi's and renewals get accounted for in your CRA filing to the FFIEC?

Hi Len,

We use Wiz here and refis and renewals are just reported as any other originated loan.

We have to manually track whether or not you have already reported the loan in that year or not. For instance I will review my CIT to make sure that there was not already a change that year and if so I will check Wiz for the loan number and if it's already reported I know not to add it again. You can also run a check for duplicate application numbers and delete any duplicates.

Having said that, we report under 1,000 loans each year. I'm not sure how some of those mega-institutions would deal with this.

Our process is to review each reportable loan prior to it being imported into CRA Wiz. I developed a spreadsheet on which I input each loan and associated CRA reportable data on during a monthly review of all loans (I get this information from a Loan Worksheet that is completed on each loan). Once the data is verified correct, I then sort the data on my spreadsheet by loan number to ensure that there are no duplicates. This entire process takes only an hour or so each month, but ensures that we are not submitting duplicates. If I get a duplicate renewal during the year, I write on the worksheet that it was reported on such and such date, then keep the worksheets together but only report the first renewal. The system really does work!

Wiz also has a 'find duplicates' function. If you use the same loan number for those refis and renewals (as we do), all it takes is running that function once per quarter or so to ferret them out. If it find any, I manually review them at that time to determine if there were additional funds or not and modify the reporting accordingly.

We import all of the new and renewed loans from our loan system, use the Find Duplicates functionalty to identify any with the same Applnumb, and then modify the Applnumb if there was an increase (you can add a "-1" or "A") and change the loan amount to report it appropriately. If there was no increase, it can just be deleted from the system.

I don't use Wiz any more but at my old bank we imported loans into Wiz. the loan ops people were supposed to code the loans correctly but occassionally didn't. We also ran a dup loan rpt both by loan number and amt. We had some loans that were renewed with the same number and some that were renewed with a new number. It took some work but I think we had pretty accurate totals in the end.

I am also a Wiz user and do the same thing as dulcinea. We run the duplicate report. If any appear, we check to see if it's a true duplicate or an increase. If it's an increase we make sure the second record is only for the amount of the increase then we add a "1" to the end of the loan number so the record does not continue to appear on the duplicate loan report and we can easily identify which loans had increases throughout the year.