How an Underwriter Actually Decides — Affordability Before FICO

The order a file is really read in, and the five quiet file-killers.

Owners assume a file is read top-down starting at the credit score. Outside the banks it usually is not. It is read in this order, and knowing the order tells you what to fix.

1. Can the cash flow carry the payment?

This is the question. Everything else is context. An underwriter takes your deposit history, works out what your business reliably brings in, subtracts what it already owes, and asks whether the payment being requested fits in what is left with room to spare. If it does not, no credit score rescues the file. If it does, a mediocre score rarely kills it — it prices it.

Which means the most powerful thing you control is the amount you ask for. A request sized to your cash flow gets approved. The same business asking for double gets declined and often concludes, wrongly, that it cannot be funded at all.

2. Is the deposit pattern real?

Underwriters trust rhythm more than totals. Regular deposits from identifiable customers read as a business. One enormous deposit and silence reads as a question. Negative days, returned items and overdrafts are read as an inability to manage timing, and they do more damage than most owners expect — frequently more than the score itself.

3. What is securing this?

Collateral changes the whole shape of a file, which is why programs secured by something real carry the loosest credit requirements. Equipment financing has the asset. Receivables financing has your invoices and advances against them, commonly 80–85% of eligible receivables. Real estate has the property. Unsecured cash-flow money has only your word and your deposits, so it is priced and termed accordingly.

4. Then, credit

Score arrives here — fourth — and it mostly sets rate and term rather than yes or no. Our lending partners publish no minimum FICO on equipment and franchise programs, 550 on advances and receivables, 600 on a line of credit, 660 on a term loan and 675 on SBA, as of September 2026. Those are floors for consideration, not offers. Recent bankruptcies, open tax liens and defaulted business debt are the items that genuinely stop files rather than just repricing them — and even then, disclosed up front, some are workable.

5. Does anyone lend to your industry, at your size?

The most under-appreciated factor. Lender appetite is specific: some will not write trucking, or cannabis-adjacent, or anything under $25,000, or anything over $2,000,000 in your state. A decline is very often nothing more than a mismatch — which is exactly why a single bank's no means little, and why placing a file with a lender that wants your industry and deal size is most of the actual work.

The five quiet file-killers

1. Negative days in the last three months of statements.
2. Stacked advances — several existing daily debits already consuming the cash flow.
3. Asking for a multiple of what the cash flow supports.
4. Incomplete statements — missing pages, wrong account, screenshots.
5. A vague purpose. “Working capital” is not a use of funds. “Inventory for a season we have already pre-sold” is.

The structuring advantage you cannot get alone

One request that no single lender will write can frequently be built as a structure that funds. A contractor needing five trucks may be declined for the total by one equipment lender and approved as separate schedules across three — same trucks, same business, same week. An owner cannot run that process alone, and a bank has no reason to. It is the main reason to place a file through a broker at all, and it costs you nothing: we are paid by the lending partner when a deal funds, never by you.

Qualification floors on this page are our lending partners' published program minimums as of September 2026. They are floors for consideration, not offers, and each lender sets its own credit policy. Nothing here is a promise of approval. Program guidelines shown are our lending partners' published minimums as of September 2026 and can change. They are qualification floors, not an offer. General information about commercial finance products, not financial, legal or tax advice for your situation.