The exact lines an underwriter reads on your bank statements

Working capital underwriting is bank statement underwriting. Three to six months of business checking decides the amount, the price, the term, and whether there is an offer at all. Your credit report is a tiebreaker. Your tax return usually never gets read. The statements are the file.

That is good news and bad news. Good, because an owner with damaged credit can still fund on strong statements. Bad, because there is nowhere to hide. Everything you did with your money for the last quarter is on those pages in order, and an experienced underwriter reads them in about six minutes.

The fourteen lines, in the order they get read

This is not a general list of what matters. This is the reading order, and what each line changes about the offer that lands on your desk.

• 1. The header block. Legal name, address, account number, statement period. If the name does not match the entity on the application and the EIN, the file stops here until you explain it. Effect: whether anything else gets read.
• 2. Beginning and ending balance. A quick sanity check that the pages are complete and unaltered. Effect: missing pages get requested, and a gap costs you a day.
• 3. Total deposits for the month. The gross line off the summary page. Effect: the first rough cut on offer size.
• 4. The deposit detail, line by line. This is the real work. Transfers from your other accounts, loan proceeds, owner injections, refunds, and reversed items all get stripped out to arrive at true revenue. Effect: the number your offer is actually sized on, and it is often 10 to 30 percent below the gross.
• 5. Deposit count. How many separate credits hit the account. Effect: risk tier and term. Twenty five deposits a month reads like an operating business. Four reads like concentration, even at the same dollars. See monthly deposit count.
• 6. Largest single deposit as a share of the month. One deposit worth 40 percent of the month triggers a customer concentration haircut. Effect: the offer gets cut, often by a third, or the funder asks for a customer list.
• 7. Average daily balance. Most banks print it. If yours does not, the underwriter computes it. Effect: the single largest driver of offer size, ahead of revenue. See average daily balance.
• 8. Low balance and days below zero. Effect: this is a pricing tier, not a note. A file with zero negative days and one with six get different factors on identical revenue. See negative days.
• 9. NSF and overdraft item lines. Counted individually, not by dollar. Effect: most desks tighten above three in a month and decline above five. See NSF and overdrafts.
• 10. Recurring same amount debits, daily or weekly. This is how open advances are found, and they are always found. Effect: determines your position. One existing debit means second position pricing. Two usually means no offer.
• 11. Payroll, rent, insurance, fuel, and card processing fees. Effect: proves this is an operating business rather than a pass through account, and lets the underwriter model what is actually left over.
• 12. Transfers out to your own accounts. Effect: stripped from revenue, and if they are large the funder will ask for statements on the receiving account. Sweeping cash out nightly is the most common self inflicted wound on this list.
• 13. Returned items, chargebacks, and reversals. Effect: signals disputed or unearned revenue. A rising trend here reads worse than a flat one, even at low dollars.
• 14. The last five business days of the most recent month. Effect: the freshness check. If the account has deteriorated since month one, the offer gets sized off the worst month, not the average.

How those lines become an offer

Underwriters do not pick a number out of the air. Most working capital desks run the same two constraints and take the lower answer.

Constraint one is revenue. A first position advance typically sizes at 60 to 100 percent of average monthly true revenue. On $120,000 a month, that is a $72,000 to $120,000 window before anything else is considered.

Constraint two is the payment against daily deposits. $120,000 a month across roughly 21.7 business days is about $5,530 of deposits a day. Most desks will not let the daily debit exceed 10 percent of that, so $553 a day. Over a 176 day term that supports $97,328 of total payback. At a 1.28 factor, that is about $76,000 funded.

Take the lower of the two and you land near $75,000. Then the balance test applies: if the average daily balance cannot absorb a bad week at $553 a day, the offer gets cut again regardless of what the revenue supports.

Two files, identical revenue, very different money

Both of these businesses deposit $120,000 a month. That is the only thing they have in common, and it is the least important line on the page.

File A can borrow roughly three times as much for roughly half the cost. Neither business is better run in any way a customer would notice. One of them keeps a balance and the other sweeps the account every night.

Revenue gets you read. Balances get you funded.

The sixty day cleanup that actually works

You cannot fix three months of statements in a week, but you can fix them in two months, and the change in pricing is usually worth more than anything you could negotiate.

• Stop sweeping. Leave operating cash in the operating account. Money in your personal savings does not raise your offer. Money sitting in the business checking does.
• Move one recurring debit later in the month. Most negative days come from a big draft landing two days before a customer pays. Ask the vendor to change the draft date and the negative days often disappear entirely.
• Turn on overdraft protection linked to a savings account. It converts an NSF item into a transfer. An underwriter counts NSF lines, and this removes them at the source.
• Deposit daily instead of weekly. Same revenue, more deposits, better deposit count, higher average daily balance. Nothing about the business changes.
• Clear any open advance before you apply if you can. A single existing position costs more in pricing than almost anything else on the file. See why stacking backfires.
• Do not open a new bank account to start clean. A fresh account with two months of history reads as a red flag and resets your time in business at that bank to zero.

What to send, and how

The fastest files we submit look the same every time: three to six full PDF statements downloaded from online banking, one file per month, every page, no phone photos and no screenshots. If you have more than one operating account, send both without being asked, because the funder will find the transfers and ask anyway. That single habit routinely saves a full day. More detail in business bank statements and preparing for underwriting.

What we do with this

Exp Capital Solutions is a broker. We do not underwrite, approve, or price anything. What we do is read your statements the same way an underwriter will before we submit, tell you plainly what they are going to say, and put the file only in front of partners whose credit box actually fits it. Sometimes the honest advice is to wait sixty days and fix the balances first, because the difference is tens of thousands of dollars. That advice costs us the deal today and we give it anyway.