Anything can be built in Flow. Someone has to own it.

Scope and posture. The vendor’s support function trains rather than builds — its published position is that the user stays in control of the mouse — and its professional services are billed hourly for build work. That is a legitimate model, and it assumes you have somebody on staff with the time and platform skill to act on the explanation. We do the work. We also cover the whole Salesforce estate rather than only the mortgage layer, which matters because most issues turn out to be Flow, permissions, data or an integration rather than the package.

Four things, in our experience, and in this order. Picklist values drift from the origination field map, so milestone alerts fire on values that no longer exist. Flows accumulate on the same object until they contend. Integration credentials expire or an origination system upgrade changes a field. And permissions decay as people join, change role and leave. None of these announce themselves — they are found by a loan officer at an inconvenient moment.

Often not, and we will say so. Where a blended model works well is when your admin knows the lending business and handles day-to-day change, while we cover the things that come up rarely and cost a lot when done wrong — integration failures, release regressions, automation consolidation, architecture decisions. We scope that split explicitly rather than duplicating what you already have.

A standing allocation of architect and admin time each month, a named person who knows your org, change requests against an agreed queue, sync-health and drift monitoring, release regression checks before anything reaches production, user onboarding and permission changes, and quarterly review of what is accumulating. We agree the allocation against your real change volume rather than selling you a tier.

Yes, and it is most of what we inherit. We start with a short assessment rather than continuing blind, because an inherited org usually contains decisions we would not have made and some of them are load-bearing. You get a written picture of what exists, what is at risk and what it would cost to stabilise, before any ongoing arrangement is agreed.

You stop. Arrangements are monthly and rolling, and we document as we go specifically so the handover is real — architecture notes, a change log and a release path. An arrangement that depends on you not being able to leave is not a support relationship.

Yes — role-based, and aimed at the moment of use rather than delivered as a one-off session nobody remembers. Loan officer, processor, assistant and manager need different things, and new joiners need onboarding long after the project team has gone. It is usually the cheapest line in a retained arrangement and the one with the most visible effect on adoption.