Stipulations are where deals quietly rot
Approved is not funded. The gap between them is a list of small requirements that nobody owns, and it is worth more than most stores realise.
There is a specific kind of dead deal that never appears in anyone reporting as lost. It was approved. Everybody celebrated. Then a bank wanted proof of residence and a second pay stub, and eleven days later the customer bought something else.
Nobody made a mistake. There was no moment where a person decided not to chase it. It just sat, because stipulations are the least visible thing in a dealership and the easiest thing in the world to assume somebody else is handling.
Why stips go invisible
- They arrive in a different place than the deal lives — an email, a lender portal, a phone call to one specific person.
- They are per-bank, so the same deal can have three different outstanding lists at once.
- They are small. Nobody escalates a missing utility bill, which is exactly why a missing utility bill can kill a deal.
- Whoever received the stip knows about it. Nobody else does. If that person is off Thursday and Friday, the deal is off Thursday and Friday.
Approved is a feeling. Funded is a fact. The distance between them is measured in unowned small tasks.
What fixes it
Put them on the deal, per bank
Not in an inbox. On the file, so that anybody who opens the deal sees what each lender is waiting on and what has already been sent. The test is whether a manager who has never touched this deal can tell you its exact state in ten seconds.
Tick them off automatically when the document lands
The most common way a stip stays open is that the customer already sent the thing. It came in as a photo, it went into a text thread, and nobody connected it to the requirement.
If an arriving document can be recognised and matched against the outstanding list without a human doing it, most of this problem evaporates on its own.
Show the customer their half
Customers do not stall on purpose. They stall because they are not sure what is left. A live list of exactly what is outstanding, on their phone, closes a surprising share of this without anyone chasing anything.
The number to track
Median days from approval to funding, and the count of deals currently sitting over seven days. If nobody in your store can produce those two figures right now, you have a leak you cannot see, and it is bigger than you think.