Managing Borrowers

A Borrower is a person or business you lend to. Every loan is tied to a borrower record, so borrowers are typically set up before their first loan.

Viewing borrowers

Go to Borrowers → View Borrowers to see your list. Use the tabs to filter:

• All Borrowers
• Approved
• Pending Approval — borrowers awaiting sign-off. Select any number of them and use Approve Selected to approve them in bulk.

Phone numbers shown for borrowers, guarantors and loans are click-to-call (phone icon) and click-to-WhatsApp (WhatsApp icon, opens a chat on your own phone or WhatsApp Web — nothing is sent from LoanTabs). The WhatsApp link needs your institution's country set (Admin → Institution Profile) to complete numbers saved without a country code.

Click a borrower to open their profile, which has these tabs:

• Details — their information
• Loans — their loans
• Guarantors — people guaranteeing their loans
• Files — uploaded documents and links. Documents the borrower uploaded themselves in the customer portal appear here too, marked "uploaded by customer"; click one to open it. You can't delete a customer's upload from here.
• Custom Fields — any extra fields your institution has defined (managed by an Admin under Admin → Custom Fields)
• Messages — every automatic SMS, WhatsApp message and email LoanTabs sent about this borrower's loans (loan notifications and payment reminders), newest first, with whether each was sent, failed or blocked and why, and any PDF receipt or statement that went with an email. At the top, the Automatic emails switch lets you stop LoanTabs emailing this borrower (their notifications, reminders and attached PDFs; staff emails, SMS and WhatsApp are not affected) — it shows who changed it and when, and needs permission to update borrowers. The log covers messages sent from the day it was switched on; replies and delivery receipts are not tracked.
• Login Access — lets the borrower sign in to your customer portal. Grant Login Access emails them a temporary password (the borrower needs a name and an email address on file). In the portal, customers can see their details but not change them - to update a customer's details, edit them here - and they can upload documents. Once access is active, the tab shows your customer portal link and the three sign-in steps; use Copy Link & Instructions to get a ready-to-send message with both. Staff who can edit borrowers see this tab.

Adding a borrower

Go to Borrowers → Create Borrower. The form is organized into sections:

• Ownership — Branch, and the Assigned Team Member (defaults to your branch's default team member if you leave it blank)
• Identification Details — First Name, Middle/Last Name, Business Name, Gender, Title, Date of Birth, Country, and a Unique Identification Number (national ID, social security number, license number, etc.)
• Contact Information — Phone Number, Alternative Phone Number, Email
• Address Information — Address, City, Province/State, Zipcode
• Employment & Financial Information — Working Status, Employer Name, Credit Score
• Custom Fields — any extra fields your Admin has defined for borrowers (Admin → Custom Fields). This section only appears if there are some.

You must provide either a First Name or a Business Name — one of the two is required, along with any custom field your Admin marked as required; everything else is optional at this stage. A few notes on the form:

• Phone numbers should be digits only, without a country code.
• You don't need to have everything ready up front: files can be added here or later from the borrower's Files tab, and custom fields can be filled in or changed later from the borrower's Custom Fields tab.
• If the custom fields couldn't be loaded, the form says so and offers Try again. You can still save the borrower and fill them in afterwards.

After saving, you're taken back to the borrower list.

Editing a borrower and Borrower Status

Open a borrower and use Edit to update their details. The edit form includes a Borrower Status field — separate from the Approved/Pending tabs on the list — with these values: Active, Inactive, Pending, Suspended, Rejected, Blacklisted. Use this to reflect a borrower's standing with your institution (for example, marking someone Blacklisted after fraud, or Suspended while you investigate something) independently of whether they've been through the initial approval step.

Importing borrowers in bulk

For onboarding many borrowers at once, use Import CSV from the borrowers list:

1. Click Import CSV, then Download CSV Template to get the correct column headers.
2. Fill in the template and click Choose CSV File to upload it.
3. The screen shows how many rows are valid and how many failed. Click Import N Valid Row(s) to bring in the good rows.
4. If some rows failed, click Download N Failed Row(s) to get a file listing just the problems, fix them, and re-upload.

Only straightforward text fields can be imported this way: first/last name, business name, ID number, phone numbers, email, address, city, state, zipcode, employer name, and credit score. Fields like Branch, Assigned Team Member, Status, Gender, Title, Date of Birth, Country, and Working Status are not part of the CSV — they're either set once for the whole batch or need to be filled in afterward via the normal edit screen, since free-text values for dropdowns and dates are too error-prone to import reliably.

Removing a borrower

There's no "delete" action for a borrower. A borrower record is what every one of their loans, payments, comments, and files links back to, so removing the row out from under that history would either orphan those linked records or require silently cascading the delete through someone's entire loan and payment history — neither of which is safe to do automatically.

Set the Borrower Status to Inactive instead (or Suspended / Blacklisted, if that better reflects why they're being taken off the roster). This is the same field described above, and it's the effective equivalent of deleting them for day-to-day use: an inactive borrower won't appear in the borrower picker when creating a new loan (see Loans), but their existing loans, payments, and history remain fully intact and reportable.