Application data entry went from up to 8 hours to 2–3 minutes

The Challenge

Outsourced data entry that couldn't scale with deal flow

Before Kaaj, Harbour Capital outsourced application processing to a third party. Accuracy was fine — capacity was the problem. Scaling meant adding human capital, and application volume doesn't arrive in a flat line. Some weeks the team was over-provisioned, other weeks deals sat in a queue.

The result was turnaround measured in hours: an application would take four or five hours — sometimes up to eight — to get from a sales rep's inbox into Harbour's system. A handwritten credit application from a dealer could eat 30 to 60 minutes of a rep's day on its own, with every inbound phone call threatening to derail it.

“Scaling was an issue because it was basically human capital. Sometimes volume would be high, sometimes low — we wouldn't use our full potential. A per-application cost made a lot more sense for us.”

The Solution

One submissions address, every rep, every deal

Harbour's workflow with Kaaj is deliberately simple: sales reps forward whatever they receive — typed, handwritten, complete or messy — to a single Kaaj submissions email. Two to three minutes later, the application data is in Harbour's system, structured and ready to work.

That simplicity paid off in an unexpected place: staff turnover. When Harbour had unplanned departures, onboarding replacements required no data-entry training at all. The entire process is one instruction — send it to submissions.

Stephen's team also leans on Kaaj's lender guideline matching to take the guesswork out of deal placement, turning every funding partner's criteria into a checklist instead of tribal knowledge.

“We haven't had to retrain anybody on data entry or app processing. All we train them on is: send it to submissions at Kaaj. And then it just works.”

The Results

Reps who sell, partners who get answers faster

With data entry off their plates, Harbour's reps spend their time on outbound calls, conferences, and vendor relationships — not catching up on the four applications they collected at a trade show. Credit decisions get back to the dealerships and vendors that send Harbour business noticeably faster.

That speed has become a growth lever. Going into Q3, Harbour's pitch to its referral partners is direct: we can turn applications around faster and handle more of them — send us a larger share of your deal flow.

Beyond the metrics, Stephen credits the partnership itself. Issues raised over a Teams chat come back with a fix, a timeline, or an honest 'here's an alternative' — from a team that knows equipment finance rather than retrofitting a generic product.

“The turnaround's great — that was what was there to solve. But the support has been out of this world. Being able to talk to somebody who understands what we're actually doing every day is invaluable.”