What Is Scrubbing?
Scrubbing refers to the automated review and organization of incoming submission data. In MCA and small business lending, packets often arrive with multiple documents in inconsistent formats.
Scrubbing transforms those into structured fields that can be trusted for decision-making.
Scrubbing typically appears during intake after a packet is received. Operators use it to verify completeness, catch errors, normalize formats, and extract key values such as bank balances or repayment terms.
How Does Scrubbing Work?
Scrubbing follows a sequence of checks that transform raw data into structured output.
- Document identification: Files such as bank statements, applications, or IDs are recognized.
- Field parsing: Relevant values are extracted from text, tables, or scans.
- Validation checks: Information is checked for completeness, consistency, and accuracy.
- Structuring: Clean data fields are organized in a format that can be written into the CRM.
Heron makes scrubbing the core of its workflow by automating these steps.
- Automated recognition: Heron detects document types such as statements, IDs, and applications.
- Checks applied: Completeness, fraud risk, duplicates, and policy fit are evaluated automatically.
- Structured output: Parsed fields such as average daily balance, statement dates, and applicant details are formatted for CRM write-back.
- Next action: Deals move forward with all critical data structured and ready for underwriting.
This turns what was once a manual review process into an automated pipeline that produces reliable results in seconds.
Why Is Scrubbing Important?
For brokers and funders, scrubbing is essential because underwriting decisions rely on accurate, complete data. Without scrubbing, teams spend hours checking documents, typing values, and correcting errors.
Heron automates scrubbing to reduce turnaround time, improve accuracy, and handle higher volumes without adding headcount. This lets underwriters focus on evaluating deals rather than cleaning up inputs.
Common Use Cases
Scrubbing appears in almost every submission workflow.
- Reviewing bank statements to parse balances, deposits, and overdraft flags.
- Checking packet completeness by identifying missing documents or pages.
- Validating dates, names, and IDs for consistency across files.
- Normalizing submissions from different ISOs into a standard structure.
- Preparing data for CRM write-back so underwriters have ready-to-use records.
FAQs About Scrubbing
How does scrubbing reduce manual work for brokers and funders?
Heron automates the review of documents by detecting types, parsing fields, and validating data. This removes the need for staff to read every file and type values manually.
What outputs should teams expect from scrubbing?
Scrubbing produces structured CRM fields such as applicant details, financial figures, and packet status. It also generates flags for risk or incompleteness.
How does scrubbing impact underwriting speed?
By producing clean, structured data upfront, scrubbing allows underwriters to skip document review and focus directly on decision-making. This cuts hours from the funding process.