Upload the PDF the lender emailed. FirstLook reads the tier grid, the rate by term and model year, the maximum advance and loan to value, the vehicle age and mileage limits, the acquisition fee, the backend caps and the stips. It shows every field it found next to the page it found it on.
You approve it, correct a value, or reject the whole sheet. Nothing is used until a person has approved it.
When the October sheet replaces September, FirstLook shows only what changed. On a typical monthly update that might be four fields out of 38. A tier B used rate that moves from 7.99% to 7.74%, a tier D maximum loan to value that drops from 105% to 100%, a maximum term on a nine model year old vehicle that goes from 60 months to 54. Those are the changes that quietly turn last month’s approval into this month’s callback, and they are the only lines you have to look at.
Program guides and rate sheets vary a great deal in layout. If your lender’s sheet is laid out in a way FirstLook cannot read, you will see that at upload, not three deals later.