For the most part, MF 4+ owners are vastly more sophisticated thank mom/pop sfr owners and may offer carry back financing to mostly benefit them not the buyer.

The tool thing is also important, I only hire guys with tools, and if they don't have the necessary tool for the job, I let them buy it with my funds and deduct them at payroll time.

If you are really considering you would want to make sure they have papers to be in the US, and check there visa status, payroll, etc. 

Spending thousands of $ to fly to an in-person event and then to Cincinnati with no promise of any return, spending hundreds of hours and pulling 90 hour weeks to underwrite for free, getting in front of sophisticated investors and pitching them a deal as a complete newbie...

My initial thought is to generate an excel doc to capture, organize, and automate this process, but hoping there are more sophisticated options available. 

These lenders are more sophisticated in dealing with investors, as they've consciously decided to follow Fannie's 10-property limit, unlike most secondary market lenders that apply a 4-property limits.

Right now, I'm working on functions for Payroll & bank deposits, as well as refinements to the existing stuff.

Neither are wrong, but are very different.Many of our differences stem from what I see as your approach to note investing being slanted toward your type of operations and it seeming to be the "right way" as you have implied and in fact stated in the past as to you being the more "sophisticated investor(s)" as opposed to "street level" or "layman" investors with tones of being inferior in concept.Many of the approaches by institutional investors, who appease a pool of investors are not even applicable to the majority of individual note investors we have here, for example, the manager's rate of return is hardly applicable when that investor doesn't have overhead expenses, employees and investors, it's over kill and not appropriate.

Of course having a pivoting wall would mean that existing space could be far better utilized but that's for another discussion.Here's a video showing a very sophisticated, motorized system (that probably cost a fortune).  

You're not putting a GC on payroll , right?