Automated Loan Decisioning in Commercial Lending

Key Takeaways:

• Manual financial spreading slows CRE lending with errors, delays, and inconsistent data that hurt decision-making and compliance.
• Automating financial spreading reduces processing time from hours to minutes and improves capacity without adding headcount.
• Blooma’s AI extracts, standardizes, and validates financial data across formats while integrating seamlessly with existing workflows.
• Lenders gain faster decisions, accurate risk metrics, and scalable operations without sacrificing data quality or audit readiness.
• Automation can shift underwriters’ focus from repetitive tasks to strategic analysis, client relationships, and growth opportunities.

The Spreadsheet Bottleneck in CRE

Financial spreading is a crucial function in commercial real estate lending, but doing it manually can be tedious, error-prone, and a significant bottleneck in your pipeline.

Automating financial spreading with intelligent technology leverages document-reading AI to instantly read PDFs, scans, and even handwritten notes and extract key financial data. These systems use advanced optical character recognition (OCR) to translate messy inputs into structured, ready-to-analyze results.

Manual spreading consumes valuable underwriter time, introduces significant risk of error, and prevents your analysts from focusing on strategic risk assessment. Larger banks and private lenders processing 10–20 deals per month can feel the drag: valuable opportunities may be delayed or lost entirely.

Automating financial spreading can enable you to quickly identify which deals merit pursuit and respond far faster to qualified opportunities.

Blooma’s financial spreading automation transforms this process from a manual burden into a streamlined, high-accuracy workflow. Our platform standardizes data across templates, validates numbers, and feeds results directly into your existing systems—so your team spends less time chasing spreadsheets and more time making informed, strategic lending decisions.

In this article, we’ll explore how Blooma redefines financial spreading, highlight the efficiency and risk-management benefits, and show how automation can translate into measurable ROI.

The Hidden Costs of Manual Spreading

• Time and Efficiency Drain

• Underwriters often spend hours or days per deal on administrative tasks—downloading documents, chasing versions in shared drives, re-formatting spreadsheets—and that time delays approval and risks losing deals to lenders who act faster.
• Your team is stuck in data-entry mode instead of engaging with clients or structuring the deal. 
• At Blooma, we focus on helping you free up underwriters for growth and relationships.
• In fact, a regional bank cut deal processing time by 85%enabling a 50% increase in capacity without adding headcount.

• Accuracy and Risk Exposure

• Manual transcription, spreadsheet formula errors, and mis-categorized line items introduce material risk.
• Some lenders compensate with two to three layers of manual review—or offshore teams—to identify and rectify the mistakes, but this adds time and costs and still burdens your risk process.
• Flawed data results in unreliable risk metrics such as DSCR or LTV, leading to poor decision-making.
• According to a GAO report, banks’ exposure to CRE loans doubled to about $3 trillion by January 2024, highlighting the significance of strong data accuracy and risk controls.

• Inconsistency and Audit Risk

• Varying workflows and expertise mean that one underwriter may produce clean, consistent spreads, whereas another may misclassify items or take twice as long.
• Such an inconsistency can compromise data quality across your portfolio.
• The absence of a standardized process raises red flags for your auditors and can increase regulatory risk.
• Automation levels the playing field by enabling every analyst to produce data in a uniform, audit-ready format—improving comparability, decreasing audit friction, and raising confidence in portfolio-wide analysis.
• For instance, a regional bank managing a $17 billion portfolio reduced manual data entry by 80%, improving both accessibility and standardization of their portfolio view.

How Blooma Automates and Perfects Financial Spreading

Here’s how Blooma helps you turn the traditional, labor-intensive spreading process into a fully automated, highly efficient workflow.

• Instant Data Extraction

• Blooma’s AI engine scans and ingests borrower documents—tax returns, rent rolls, financial statements—regardless of format (PDFs, scans, Excel).
• It identifies and extracts critical financial lines (assets, liabilities, revenue, expenses) in seconds, eliminating manual entry.
• As a result, your team gets clean, structured data at the front of the deal rather than hours of spreadsheet prep.

• Automated Standardization

• Once the data is extracted, Blooma maps it instantly to your institution’s internal spreadsheet template—ensuring every deal is assessed with consistent categories, periods, and layouts.
• This removes the variation between analysts and ensures that every spread is ready for decision-making without manual cleanup.

• Data Validation and Flagging

• Beyond extraction and formatting, Blooma runs built-in validation checks: line item consistency, cross-period logic, and anomaly detection (e.g., sudden expense jump).
• It flags discrepancies for your team to review, so they don’t have to review every cell, and only address the errors and exceptions.
• With this approach, you can reduce the risk of flawed metrics (DSCR, LTV) entering your models and avoid costly decision errors.

• Integration with Existing Workflows

• Blooma integrates seamlessly via APIs with your LOS, CRM, and other core platforms without requiring a complete overhaul.
• Standardizes spreadsheet data flows directly into your decision-making workflows, without requiring duplicate data entry on system silos.
• This allows you to keep your existing stack while layering Blooma’s intelligence—enabling faster, more accurate underwriting without disruption.

The Strategic ROI of Automated Spreading

• Accelerated Decision Velocity

• By implementing financial spreading automation, you can reduce the time spent on spreadsheets from hours to minutes per deal.
• This speed enables much faster underwriting, a shorter time to close deals, and an improved borrower experience, giving you a clear competitive edge.

• Enhanced Focus and Productivity

• When routine spreading is automated, your most skilled credit analysts and underwriters can focus on strategic risk assessment, client relationships, and structuring high-value deals, instead of doing data entry.
• This shift allows you to unlock scalability, allowing you to process a higher volume of deals without hiring more staff.
• Using our Origination Intelligence, a mid-market bank increased its deal volume by 67% and loan value by 67.5%, unlocking growth with existing resources.

• Improved Risk Management

• Automation can help you improve accuracy and avoid manual transcription errors, miscategorized line items, and outdated spreadsheet formulas. 
• Thus, the key metrics you rely on (such as DSCR, LTV, and Debt Yield) are based on clean, consistent, and reliable data.
• Consistent data across all deals enables better portfolio-wide risk management and audit readiness.
• The outstanding commercial/multifamily mortgage debt reached $4.81 trillion in Q1 2025—underscoring the scale of portfolios that require robust, consistent oversight.

Focus on Strategy, Not Spreadsheets

Financial spreading automation is a strategic investment for maximizing ROI in commercial real estate lending. By reducing processing time from hours to minutes, eliminating manual errors, and ensuring consistent, audit-ready data, you can gain a sharper competitive edge and the confidence to scale operations.

Blooma was built by CRE experts to simplify the complexity of lending through Intelligent Automation. It frees your team of underwriters from repetitive tasks so they can focus on strategic risk analysis, client relationships, and growth opportunities.

Ready to move your team beyond spreadsheets? Request a demo today and explore how Blooma’s automation can transform your credit analysis workflow, accelerate decisions, and return your underwriters to focus on the art of lending.