Everything in the mortgage industry seems to be in electronic form, loan applications, closing documents, etc.  The benefits of having electronic forms can be taken even further by utilizing them beyond the loan process.  You may not realize it, but nearly every document that you work with can be converted into an electronic form.  Maybe your office still utilizes a paper form for employment applications.  Or maybe you are using post it notes to let the secretary know you need more #2 pencils.  Regardless of the task your old paper form is performing—an electronic form can do it better.

Electronic forms can also help you perform new tasks as well.  You could use a form on your website to capture information from potential customers, perhaps offering them a free appraisal for filling the form out. You could send existing customers a form to pass on to their friends, offering a reward for each form that is returned to you.  All of this can be done with a PDF.  The form can be tracked, and even an email button inserted into the form to ensure that the form comes back to you.

Regardless if you need a paper form converted or a new form designed from scratch, electronic forms are the way to go.  Get rid of the paper, post its and Word docs and utilize an electronic form.

If you are like me, you try to automate anything you can in order to boost productivity. One great tool I’ve recently been playing with is the iMacros add-on for Firefox, which is also available for Internet Explorer if you prefer IE.

It’s a free download that plugs in to your browser and allows you to record things you do in the browser and replay them anytime you like. You can even set the “macros” to loop as many times as you want if you have a task that needs to be repeated over and over again.

The sky really is the limit in uses for this tool.  Here are a few ideas for boosting productivity, all potentially requiring only a single click:

• Pull up your favorite lender websites each morning, login and go to your preferred rate sheets.
• Pull up your personal website/blog and login to view your daily statistics.
• Pull up webmail (if you use webmail), login and go to your inbox.
• Post an ad on Craigslist.
• Run a search on your county assesor’s website for ARMs that will convert soon.  It’s even possible to set up a macro to extract data and prepare a list for you.

Have you tried this yet?  If not, here’s a nice tutorial for getting started.