Some loans have multiple borrowers or co-signors. Some borrowers take out multiple loans from the same provider. In either of these simple situations, a surprising number of lending platforms fall short—they equate each borrower to one account and vice versa, making it difficult or even impossible to represent a more complex lending arrangement. LoanPro, however, treats each account, borrower, and card as a separate entity in the software. You can then link these entities together to capture multifaceted relationships between multiple customers and accounts.

This article will break down what each entity is from a high-level, and point you in the right direction for the different ways to link them all together, but here's the big picture:

• A tenant is a shared environment where settings, accounts, and borrowers are saved.
• Accounts include loans, leases, and lines of credit. They can exist independently, or they can be linked to customers or to other accounts.
• Customers include consumers and businesses. They can exist independently, or be linked to accounts.

Tenant

A tenant is an environment in LoanPro. Each tenant is unique and independent of others. They each have their own login and API credentials, their own settings, and their own accounts and customers. 

Many of our clients only have a single tenant, but others have multiple (either sandbox and production tenants, or even several independent tenants used for different parts of their operation).

Customers

Customers exist independent of any accounts. They can be linked to any number of accounts (or none at all). When you link a borrower to an account, you also decide what type of relation they have—Primary, secondary, or additional. The primary customer the main person or business connected to that account. Secondary customers could be additional borrowers or co-signors. The ‘additional customer’ role is used for anyone closely connected to the account, but not financially responsible, like a lawyer or estate manager.

Payment profiles are saved to customers, so if you want to process bank account or card payments on an account, you'll need to link a customer with a payment profile. (Customers and profiles have a one to many relationship: Each customer can have any number of payment profiles, but each profile is linked to only one customer.)

Loans, leases, and lines of credit

Loans, leases, and lines of credit can be linked together and to borrowers. There's multiple ways of connecting them, all explained in our article on linking customers and accounts. When you create an account, you can either link an existing customer, add a new one, or leave the loan without any borrowers. 

There are some differences in hierarchy between loans and lines of credit:

• Before you create a line of credit account, you need a line of credit program. These programs are created at the tenant-level, and work as templates to streamline the process of creating individual accounts. After the line of credit is created, it still has a connection to the program. Lines can also be linked to cards, as explained below.
• Installment loans and leases don't have any equivalent of a program. Even if you create them through a pre-configured loan template, loans and leases don't have any ongoing connection to that template afterwards.

Transactions—including payments, funding disbursements, charges, and other adjustments—are logged on individual accounts. If accounts are linked, you can split a payment between multiple accounts.

Cards

Cards are linked to line of credit accounts. If a customer is linked to that account, the card can be directly linked to the customer as well. And just like how you can link multiple customers to a single account, you can link multiple cards to the same account, giving different borrowers their own access point to the credit limit.

While most transactions are logged on the account itself, swipes are also saved on the card that made them.