When you first open Easy HUD you might be struck by the red, white and blue boxes. No, this color scheme isn’t there out of patriotism. Each color represents a particular type of field on the HUD settlement statement form and it’s important to understand how each box works in the grand scheme of things.
White boxes on the HUD settlement statement are standard fields. Most of them start out blank, although when you open a new case a few boxes in Section H will be filled out with the agent information you provided. Information in white fields will come only from you, the user. If you enter new information into the Section H fields that are automatically completed when opening a new file, your changes won’t later be overwritten by the software even if they differ from the agent information in default settings.
The red boxes on the HUD form are automatically calculated by the software. If you click on them nothing will happen. You can’t change the values here because that would undermine the accuracy of the form. If a calculated value is incorrect, then it’s because of information entered somewhere else on the form so you will need to change to source data rather than changing the calculated values.
The HUD statement blue boxes are the fields that probably confuse users the most. These are both automatically completed and user modifiable. As values are entered into certain fields, some of the blue boxes will be updated. If you make changes to these blue boxes then you need to realize that those changes can be overwritten if you modify the source values.
For example, you enter the buyer’s contract sales price of the home in field 101, a white box. That is copied over into field 401, the seller’s contract sales price, which is a red box and can’t be changed. Buyer and seller price need to agree. It is also copied into field 700 where it is used to calculate broker fees, but this is a blue box so you can change it. Maybe the house sold for $250k but the commission is being figured on only $200k, so you change field 700 to $200k and the commission calculation automatically updates.
However if you go back and change the sales price in field 101, it will be copied into field 700 and overwrite your modified commission baseline. You will have to change field 700 back to $200k again. Always verify any manual changes you make before printing the final form.
The red, white and blue boxes are typical of the flexible features you find in all of our HUD settlement statement software. Download a demo or try the full product risk-free for 30 days to see how much easier real estate paperwork can be.
