You are not really shopping for software. You are shopping for where a set of loan files will live for the next ten years, who can reach them, and what happens to them when you stop being the person who maintains the spreadsheet.
That reframing matters, because it changes which questions are worth asking. Feature lists are easy to compare and mostly do not decide anything. Six things do.
A note on how we handle facts about other products
Before the list, the thing that will look odd if we do not explain it.
We publish claims about a competitor's product only when we have read their own published pages and dated what we read. We have done that for one competitor. We have not done it for NoteSmith, so you will not find us telling you what NoteSmith does, what it costs, or what it runs on. Our comparison page leaves that column deferring to the vendor on purpose, and says so in plain language. The one NoteSmith thing we know first-hand is the shape of their export files, because our importer reads them, and that is a fact about our software rather than theirs.
So this is not a post about what the other product is like. It is the list of questions we would ask, with our own answers stated plainly so you can hold them against whatever a vendor tells you. The full side by side comparison applies the same rule row by row.
1. Who owns the data, and how do you get it out
Start here, because every other answer is reversible and this one is not.
The question is not "do you have an export button". Almost everything has an export button. The question is what comes out of it. A complete export has one row per loan with the terms, and one row per payment with the date, the amount received, and the split between interest, principal, escrow, and fees. If the export drops the split, you have a summary rather than a history, and rebuilding the split later means recomputing years of accrual.
How to check it. During the trial, before you commit anything, run the full export and open the file. If you cannot read a payment ledger out of it with a spreadsheet, your data is less portable than you think.
2. How the software is licensed
There are two common shapes and they suit different books.
A one time license is bought once and owned, with no recurring charge for the license itself, which is genuinely hard to beat on raw dollars for a small book that is not going to change. Ask whether it is priced per computer or per person, what an upgrade to the next major version costs, and what you pay to reach the data from somewhere other than the machine it sits on.
A subscription is a recurring charge that includes hosting, backups, and updates, and adds capacity as the book grows. Ask what happens at your loan count rather than at the headline tier, and what an extra person costs.
How to check it. Price your real book at both, three years out, at the loan count and seat count you expect to have. Not today's number.
3. Where the year end forms come from
A Form 1098 is a summary of a ledger. If the software producing the form is not the software holding the ledger, someone is retyping numbers in January, and January is the worst month of the year to be retyping numbers.
Ask which forms the product generates, whether the amounts come from the posted payment records or from a separate entry screen, and whether the product transmits to the IRS or only produces the form for you to file. Those are three different questions and vendors answer them at different levels of detail.
How to check it. Ask to see the form generated from a loan with a messy year on it: a partial payment, a late fee, and a payment received in the first week of January for a December installment. The clean case tells you nothing.
4. What a borrower can see without calling you
Every payoff request that arrives as a phone call is fifteen minutes and a document you have to produce by hand. Every one that a borrower answers themselves is not.
Ask whether the borrower sees a live balance or a monthly snapshot, whether they get a payoff figure good to a date they choose, whether they can see their own payment history, and whether they have to create an account to do it. The last one matters more than it sounds: a portal that requires borrowers to register is a portal most borrowers never use.
How to check it. Ask for the borrower view, not the servicer view, in the demo.
5. How credit reporting is produced
If you furnish to the bureaus, the format is Metro 2 and the file has to come from the same ledger the payments are posted to. Reporting is also a decision with legal consequences, including obligations that attach to a furnisher, so this is a question for your attorney before it is a question for a vendor.
How to check it. Ask whether the file is generated in the product or exported for a third party to format, and ask what happens to a reported account after a dispute or a bankruptcy filing.
6. What happens when a number does not tie
Every servicing system eventually disagrees with someone: a borrower, a closing agent, or a note buyer doing diligence. What you need at that moment is a record of who did what, when, and to which field. Ask whether there is an audit trail, whether it is readable by a human rather than a database export, and whether it covers edits and status changes or only payments. Then ask who you actually reach for support and how fast.
Where NoteHarbor sits
Stated plainly so you can hold it against anyone else's answer. NoteHarbor runs in a browser on any device. Amortization, payment application, and payoff math run in integer cents through a tested engine. Escrow analysis follows the RESPA cushion cap. Form 1098 plus 1099-INT, 1099-A, 1099-C and 1099-NEC generate from the ledger you service against, and we do not transmit them to the IRS for you. Borrowers get a secure link with a live balance, a live payoff quote, and their full history, with no account to create, and you can revoke or rotate the link at any time. Metro 2 reporting is built in.
Pricing is published: Solo is $40 a month for up to 10 loans, Pro is $119 for up to 50 with three users, and extra full seats are $12 each per month on Pro and Business. The full pricing page shows every tier and the per loan rate past the included count. The trial is 30 days with no card.
Bringing an existing book across is its own subject. The import page describes what the wizard reads, and there is a step by step walkthrough of switching from NoteSmith if that is the file you are holding.
If you are still deciding whether the software line item is worth it at all, what servicing your own notes actually costs prices the three common approaches without picking a winner for you.
When to stay where you are
Honestly: if your book is small and static, you are the only person who touches it, your borrowers do not ask for anything online, and your current software does what you need, switching buys you very little. Migration is real work even when it goes well. The move earns its keep when the book needs to be reachable from more than one desk, shared with more than one person, self serve for borrowers, or tied to seller finance tax math you would otherwise be doing in a second system.
While you evaluate, you can rebuild a schedule from your own note terms with the free amortization calculator to check any single figure against whatever a vendor shows you. It is public and stays that way, whatever you decide about software.
This article is general information, not legal, tax, or accounting advice. Reporting obligations, credit furnishing duties, and escrow requirements depend on facts specific to your notes and your state. Talk to a licensed attorney and your CPA about your own situation.