Including us. Each one has a follow-up that is harder than the question, which is the point — every vendor has a good answer to the first question and only some have one to the second.
We have not written a page comparing ourselves to named competitors, deliberately. Most of what we know about rivals is first-hand rather than published, and first-hand knowledge is good enough to shape how we build and not safe to assert publicly as fact about somebody else’s product.
A question list gets you further anyway. You can put these to every vendor on your list, including this one, and compare the answers rather than the marketing.
In a demo
If the answer involves a model whose weightings are commercially confidential, ask how you would explain a decision about a resident to a board member or an Ombudsman investigator. That conversation happens after something has gone wrong, and “the vendor’s algorithm” is not an answer anybody accepts.
Ask to watch somebody change one, on a demo system, during the demo. The recurring cost in this category is rarely the licence; it is the quotation that arrives when you want a number moved. If the honest answer is “raise a ticket”, price that over five years.
The useful follow-up is where it is enforced. A flag on a screen is bypassed by anybody who opens the account directly. Ask whether the block also stops the overnight automation and whether the send itself refuses.
There is a right answer and a dangerous one. Treated as expired, the account rejoins the chase while the person is still in crisis treatment. Ask to see the record with the end date blank.
If the answer is “we set a flag”, ask who maintains it across the whole book. A monthly payer billed weekly looks weeks in arrears for most of every month, and that is a large part of what fills a badly-tuned worklist.
Cases whose cause has gone away should leave the list on their own, with the reason recorded as an event rather than as a silent state change. Ask what the audit trail shows afterwards.
Not for one account after somebody opens it. Compliance is judged at the point a claim is issued, so the only useful version of this is a standing figure that names which requirement is your gap, before solicitors are instructed.
Ask whether it counts “a protected characteristic is recorded” and “an assessment was made and an adjustment offered” as one number or two. Only the second discharges anything, and collapsing them is how the duty gets reported as satisfied when it has not been.
It should refuse. The mandatory arrears ground does not exist against a secure tenant at any level of arrears, so a system that infers or guesses the regime produces a route that reads as authoritative and is wrong.
Ask at what level it is prevented. “The UI does not offer it” is a different answer from “the database grants no DELETE”, and only one of them survives a support engineer with a console.
If there is no answer to this, that is the answer. Every product has a boundary; a vendor who cannot name theirs has either not looked or is not telling you. Ask for it in writing before contract, not during implementation.
Ask which landlords, over what period, measured against what baseline, and whether the comparison was against their own previous year or a sector benchmark. Then ask whether they will commit to it for your book.
Fair warning
Since the list is meant to be used on us too.
On a live account, in under ten minutes per question.
Tell us about your organisation and what you are trying to fix. It goes straight to the team, and a person replies.