Hearth & Acorn Financing Integration

What the financing integration does

A $45,000 bath remodel sounds expensive. $612 a month sounds doable. The financing integration moves the conversation from sticker shock to monthly payment without your estimator having to learn underwriting, run credit, or talk numbers a homeowner won’t share.

• Monthly-payment widget on every estimate — under the estimate total, the homeowner sees “or as low as $X/month with Hearth” — pre-qualified rates calculated from their estimate amount.

• One-click rate check — homeowner taps “see my rate,” lands on Hearth’s or Acorn’s hosted application, gets a soft-pull offer in 90 seconds. No score impact.

• Approval status pushes back into GHL — once they’re approved, the contact gets tagged financing-approved, and the next-step CTA in the workflow shifts from “schedule another conversation” to “sign the estimate.”

• You stay non-licensed — Hearth and Acorn are the financing parties. You’re the contractor. The handoff keeps you compliant and out of any RESPA/UDAAP exposure.

• Tracks attach rate — every estimate logs whether financing was offered, viewed, or accepted, so you can see attach rate per estimator monthly.

• Tracks attach rate by estimator — workflow logs which estimates included financing, which homeowners clicked, which got approved. You see attach rate per estimator monthly.

How it works under the hood

The integration runs on Hearth’s and Acorn’s standard contractor APIs plus a GHL workflow layer:

1. Estimate sent — when an estimate fires, a parallel workflow generates a Hearth/Acorn application link pre-filled with the estimate amount and contact info.
2. Embedded in estimate — the estimate PDF and SMS both include the “see your monthly payment” link.
3. Offer capture — when the homeowner receives an offer, the callback hits a GHL inbound webhook and updates the contact custom field financing_status = offered along with the offered rate range.
4. Tag and route — financing-approved tag triggers a follow-up SMS within 5 minutes: “Looks like you’re approved for monthly payment — ready to lock in the project timeline?”
5. Estimator notified — the estimator’s GHL app pings them that the homeowner got an offer, so the follow-up call has context.

What it’s NOT

• Not in-house financing. You’re not lending money. Hearth and Acorn are the lenders. You’re a referring contractor with a contractor-side dashboard.
• Not a guarantee of approval. Approval is between the homeowner and the financing partner. The soft-pull check is preliminary. Full approval is a hard-pull after they apply.
• Not the only path to close. Plenty of homeowners pay cash or use a HELOC. The financing offer is one of three paths surfaced — never the only path pushed.
• Not a substitute for your accounting. Financed jobs still flow through your normal accounting. Hearth or Acorn pays you (typically within 1-3 days of milestone completion); the homeowner pays them monthly.

Why we integrate both Hearth and Acorn

Hearth’s approval criteria favor middle-credit homeowners doing kitchens, baths, and full remodels in the $15-100k range. Acorn covers a broader credit band and goes lower on smaller projects ($3-30k) — roofs, decks, windows, smaller scopes. Running both means more homeowners get pre-qualified somewhere.

The workflow tries Hearth first for projects over $20k and Acorn first for projects under $20k. If the first partner doesn’t make an offer, the homeowner is routed to the second. You see both decisions in the contact record; the homeowner sees one clean handoff.