What the Underwriting Report Checks Before It Grades

Last updated: September 2026

Drop the bank statement PDFs on a deal and you get a graded report back. That part everyone knows. What I want to show is the order it works in, because the first thing it does is decide whether it should grade at all.

Integrity first

Before any number, the report checks the paper itself. How many statement months are there. Which accounts do they cover, with each account's own gross deposits, so a merchant who splits deposits across two accounts doesn't look half as big as they are. Is the record complete enough to grade. It wants three months and 85 days of coverage, and it tells you when a file falls short of that, because a grade computed on a short file is a confident fiction.

That check sits at the top of the report as its own band, with the full detail behind it, so an underwriter sees "three months, two accounts, complete" before they see a single ratio.

Then the numbers, in dependency order

Revenue comes next, because every later ratio divides by it. Then average daily balance and negative days. Then NSFs. Then existing MCA positions, sized against daily revenue, which is the stacking picture as a burden number rather than a count. Cash flow and red flags round it out, with the underwriter's notes at the bottom. All of it on the deal, in one report.

The order is a real dependency chain. Get it wrong and you get numbers that look fine and aren't, which is why the report runs it the same way every time.

The grade and the offer

The paper grades A, B, C, or D, or it declines. The factor bands with the grade. On a gradable file the report carries an offer recommendation: an amount, a factor, and a term. On a decline there's no recommendation, so nobody anchors on a number the paper doesn't support.

Some things decline a file on their own: an average daily balance under the floor, too many bad months, a debt burden past the line, revenue falling month over month past the line, or too many positions. Each of those is a rule the report applies the same way to every file, and the report says which one fired.

Positions the merchant will pay off at closing count differently. Tell the report which ones get paid off and the grade accounts for it, because a consolidation looks like a stack until you know it isn't.

What it's for

I built it as a first pass to save your underwriter an hour a file. It reads the paper and lays out what a decision needs. It doesn't make the decision. It isn't perfect and I don't call it error free. Your underwriter reviews the numbers instead of keying them.

Ask it a quick one

You don't need the whole report to answer a quick question. Ask the chat "read the March statement, what's the ADB" and it reads that PDF and answers: the balance, deposits, NSFs, negative days, the lowest balance and the day it happened. Then "and February?" and it keeps going.