What Funders Look at in Your New York Business Bank Statements

Why statements, not tax returns

A tax return is a yearly summary, often prepared months after the fact and shaped by deductions. Three months of bank statements show what happened last month. That is why we ask for about three months of business bank statements, require no tax returns and consider FICO 500+ with a soft credit pull. For many owners this is the difference between waiting for a file to be assembled and applying today.

What shows up on a statement

• Deposits. How often money arrives, and whether it comes from customers or transfers.
• Balances. Whether the account regularly dips close to zero.
• Overdraft or returned-item fees. These suggest tight timing.
• Recurring withdrawals. Rent, payroll, vendor payments and existing obligations.
• Large unusual items. A big deposit or withdrawal that is not part of normal operations.

None of these alone is a verdict. A funder is reading the pattern across the months.

Before you apply: a ten-minute cleanup

1. Download all months in full. Complete statements with every page, not screenshots.
2. Mark the odd items. A tax refund, a loan from a relative, a one-time equipment sale. If you can explain them in a sentence, do.
3. Separate personal spending if you can. If you only have one account, note the ratio of business and personal activity.
4. Check for NSF fees. If any appeared, be ready to say why.

Strong month, weak month: how to think about variation

What the statements cannot show

Statements show history, not intent. They do not show that you just signed a large contract, that a competitor closed or that a repair is imminent. Use the application to say what the money is for and when you expect it to pay back through your normal deposits.

We fund from $25,000 to $5,000,000, funding can arrive in as little as 24 hours after approval, and sole proprietors can apply. The application takes about five minutes.

A worked example of explaining a statement

For illustration only: say a New York landscaping business shows $18,000 in deposits in month one, $9,000 in month two and $21,000 in month three. Read cold, the middle month looks like a problem. With one sentence of context, such as a wet spring that delayed three large jobs until the following month, it reads as timing. The same logic applies to a restaurant that closed for a week to renovate or a retailer that stocked up before a holiday and paid suppliers in a lump.

The rule of thumb is simple: if something on the statement would make you ask a question, a funder will probably ask it too. Answer it in the application before it is asked. That saves a round of back-and-forth, and it keeps your file moving.

What not to do

• Do not move money between accounts just before applying to inflate deposits. Transfers are easy to spot and make a clean file harder to read.
• Do not leave out a month because it was weak. The three months are read together.
• Do not send photos of paper statements when a downloaded PDF is available.