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Brokers & End Users — Getting Productive

A friendly learning path for brokers and end users: understand deals, build and use forms, and run the Input Portal day to day.

Welcome aboard! This learning path is for brokers, loan writers, and everyday team members who will live in ZiplineOS day to day — the people who take an enquiry, gather the right information, and shepherd a deal through to settlement. You don't need a technical background, and you won't be touching code. If you can fill in a form and drag a card across a board, you have everything it takes.

By the time you finish this path you'll be able to:

  • Speak the language confidently — you'll know what a form, a workflow, and a deal are, and how they fit together.
  • Find your way around the Input Portal, the home base where deals are created and run.
  • Build and shape forms — choose the right field types, present questions clearly, and keep answers clean with validation.
  • Run a real deal end to end, from first enquiry to a completed application.
  • Understand what your clients see on their side of the process.

You don't have to do this all in one sitting. The path is grouped into short modules — work through them in order, tick off each step, and stop whenever you need a break. Each step links to a single doc to read; everything builds on what came before.

Module 1 — Core ideas (start here)

Before clicking anything, get the vocabulary straight. Five minutes here saves a lot of confusion later.

  1. Learn the three building blocks. Understand the difference between a form (the questions you ask), a workflow (the journey a deal travels through), and a deal (one real application moving along that journey). This single distinction unlocks everything else.

  2. Get oriented to the Input Portal. See the big picture — what the portal is for, who uses it, and where you fit in. This short intro also explains that applicants never log in here; they get a private link instead.

A quick naming heads-up: some pages call this product the Input Hub and others call it the Input Portal. They mean exactly the same thing — don't let the two names trip you up.

✅ End of Module 1: you can explain, in one sentence each, what a form, a workflow, and a deal are.

Module 2 — Using the Input Portal

Now let's tour the actual tool and the pieces you'll work with every day. Read these in order — each one zooms in on a part of the previous.

  1. Take the guided tour. Walk one real mortgage application from first enquiry all the way to settlement and watch every piece play its part. This is the best single overview of how a deal actually moves.

  2. Understand the journey: workflows and steps. Learn how a deal's pipeline is built from steps shown as columns on a board, and what each type of workflow item (fill a form, collect signatures, run a check, and more) does.

  3. Build the questions: forms and fields. Get to know every field type you can drop into a form — text, dates, dropdowns, file uploads, lookups, and repeatable sections — so you capture exactly the information you need.

  4. Make questions look right: display modes. The same field can be shown as a slider, a grid, a toggle, a disclaimer, and more. Learn which presentation suits which question so your forms feel effortless to fill in.

  5. Keep your data clean: validations. Mark fields as required and add rules that check answers before a form can be completed — so problems get caught up front, not three steps later.

You're never starting from a blank page. Platform admins curate ready-made packs — bundles of forms and whole workflows — that you can install in one click and then tweak to fit how your business works.

✅ End of Module 2: you can navigate the Input Portal, recognise the common field types and display modes, and know how validation protects your data.

Module 3 — Hands-on practice

Reading takes you a long way; building cements it. Now put it all together with a click-by-click first session.

  1. Build a deal from scratch. Follow a step-by-step tutorial that has you build a small but realistic setup — a form, a workflow, and a test deal you fill in and move across the pipeline. By the end you'll have done the whole loop yourself.
    • Read: Getting Started with the Input Portal

This hands-on tutorial lives in the internal and technical spaces, so it's only reachable if your account has that access. If you can't open it, ask your administrator — and in the meantime the Module 2 guides above cover the same ground in reading form.

✅ End of Module 3: you've built a form, published a workflow, and run a test deal end to end with your own hands.

Module 4 — The client side

Your applicants never see the Input Portal — so it helps to understand what they experience when you send them off to gather details or sign.

  1. See the applicant's view. Learn how clients receive a secure, password-less magic link by email that opens just their part of the application — the one form or document they need, and nothing else.
    • Read: Collect (Client Portal)

The Collect reference is written for internal and technical readers and lives in those spaces, so it's only reachable with that access. The key takeaway you can carry without it: clients get a private link to one task at a time — no login, no clutter.

✅ End of Module 4: you can describe what happens after you send a deal step to a client and what they see on their end.

You're productive — what's next

Congratulations — you can now talk the talk, build forms, run deals, and explain the client experience. From here, keep these guides bookmarked as your day-to-day references:

The fastest way to get good is to build something real. Pick a process you already run on paper or in a spreadsheet, recreate it as a form and a workflow, and run a test deal through it. You'll learn more in one afternoon of building than in a week of reading.