Settlement Room by Emphasys

Settlement Room is a user-friendly transaction management system that has been designed for direct use by brokers, agents and teams without the need for transaction coordinators. Most recently Emphasys has made a number of enhancements to the product to improve the user interface making it one of the most user friendly transaction management products on the market today. Settlement room provides transaction workflow management, communication with all parties in the transaction and the ability to schedule tasks for all participants as needed. Tasks can be scheduled using fixed dates or dates based on other events, such as making one task due so many days after another event.

The document manager is included with Settlement Room and is not offered currently as a stand-alone. Easily email documents into your transaction websites.

Settlement Room provides:

• The ability to fax documents into your transaction websites
• Ability to distribute transaction documents from your website
• Ability to attach transaction documents to orders and emails by just checking a box
• Ability to set permissions as to who can view any document
• Ability to store common documents for use in multiple transactions
  

In terms of communication, Settlement Room does a good job of sharing transaction data with everyone involved in the transaction.

Communication features include:

• Ability of all participants to post and read messages
• Ability to restrict message access to selected participants
• Ability to schedule messages to be automatically sent by email
• Inclusion of special tools to automatically request and manage Showing Feedback
• Ability to Import and manage contact lists, and synchronize with MS Outlook
• Ability to automatically invite common participants into each new transaction

The Settlement Room system has greatly reduced the number of choices a userfaces on each screen and pushed many of the features back into the individual modules, making the system appear much more user friendly. The overall design appears current and is very visually appealing.

When a user logs into the system they see either their calendar, which highlights all activities that are scheduled or they can open to the Transaction List, which is simply that.

Settlement Room does a good job allowing users to track tasks, create action plans via printable lists as well as calendar views, which is a great feature. Key task due dates can be entered specifically or entered as a number of days after another event, such as “3 days after listing.”

Automatic email notifications are sent to all team members and clients, as specified, upon task or order completion.

The system will also send out automatic email reminder notices to any transaction participants for any task they are responsible for.

Private tasks can also be created that are not visible to the transaction invitees. Users can also store task and order lists to be used on future transactions for instant assignment.

One negative we noticed that it is interesting to note is that while Settlement Room notes the ability to key a task due date off of other dates they cannot key due dates off of other activities. So while you could say a task is due 10 days after a fixed date, could not make the task due 10 days after the completion of a task, if the date is unknown.

Settlement Room has not broken out its Document Management product from the full Transaction Management system but includes it with the full product. The following is a list of features related to the Settlement Room Document Management:

• Upload documents into your transaction websites
• Email documents into your transaction websites
• Fax documents into your transaction websites
• Distribute transaction documents from your website
• Attach transaction documents to orders and emails by just checking a box
• Invisible security; you easily select who can see each document
• Any document can be viewed, printed, faxed, emailed to others
• Upload photos, spreadsheets, links to websites, tours, etc.
• Store common documents for use in multiple transactions

Conclusion

Emphasys has made a decision to provide Settlement Room to agents, brokers and teams that will use the product themselves, and has not designed it to be used by large companies with internal transaction coordinators. This does not mean the product could not serve a larger company but clearly the product has been designed with user friendliness in mind rather than trying to include every feature you many find in deeper products designed to be managed by professional staff. Settlement Room is a very capable product that has been field tested for many years. Its key strength is user friendliness, which is not to be under estimated. With most technology users only using a small percentage of available features on any system, this would appear to be a solid approach.

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