Lend what the business can afford to repay
Cash flow underwriting from the business bank account: a DSCR with borrowed and owner money taken out of revenue first.
The statement review you already do, done in seconds.
The business bank account is the real P&L. KoraConnect reads it directly and hands your underwriter a decision-ready file.
A file built from the account itself
Raw descriptions become labeled lines, and revenue, the expense structure and debt service assemble with no manual spreading.
An answer in under 45 seconds
Spreading a file by hand takes 30 to 90 minutes. The same read returns while the applicant is still on the phone.
Small tickets become worth underwriting
A bigger request brings more to read: more accounts, a year of statements on each, thousands of transactions. The same automated read covers all of it, so the cost of a decision stops scaling with staff hours.
One analysis covers every loan you write.
Working capital, equipment and term loans run on the file the rest of this page describes. Floor plan, revenue-based financing, advances and guarantees each lean on a different part of it.
Floor plan lines
Days supply, this dealer104daysThe dealer’s account is the lot. Aged units, curtailment paid to another lender, and a sale that deposits with no payoff behind it, weeks before a floor check finds any of it.
Revenue-based financing
The revenue share sized on deposits the account actually shows, with the thin months in view before terms are set.
Merchant cash advance
Advances already being repaid, found by their remittance pattern rather than by a bureau pull.
Personal guarantees
The guarantor’s account read as a backstop behind the business, never as extra revenue.
Not every deposit is revenue. Lend on the ones that are.
Borrowed money, an owner transfer and one strong season all lift a deposit total, and none of them repay a loan.
Underwrite the real revenue, not raw inflow
Card settlements, customer payments and cash deposits count. Asset sales and refunds are tracked but excluded, and borrowed or owner money never counts at all.
Price the deal knowing where the revenue comes from
Revenue share from the top three payers arrives on every file, so a business carried by one contract is visible against the ceiling you set.
Tell a seasonal trough from a business that is shrinking
Both of these files trip the same decline counter. The month-to-month swing is what separates them: a business with a season swings, a business that is contracting grinds down, and both readings arrive with the monthly series.
Underwrite the account that is half personal.
Roughly one applicant in five runs the business and the household through one account, and nothing has to be separated by hand before you can underwrite it.
Catch a business run out of personal checking
Every statement is scored on what its transactions do, not on the name at the top. A personal account running payroll and card settlements is read as a business.
Count the business revenue inside a personal account
Business inflows are counted as operating revenue and personal deposits are read on their own side. Money moved between the applicant’s own accounts is excluded from both, so no dollar is counted twice.
See when the owner is funding the business
Personal income backs the read up rather than adding to it, and personal cash moving into the business is reported as a burden on the household instead of as capacity.
Count every cost before the payment is set.
Coverage is only as good as the expenses under it, so the waterfall counts the labor a spreadsheet misses and puts the owner’s own pay in its proper place.
Know instantly whether the deal clears
Net operating income against debt service, plotted on the floor you set. 12,600 over 8,850 is 1.42, and every input is a line a reviewer can open.
Size the real labor cost, not the stated one
Recurring transfers to the same handful of people every two weeks. Real labor cost that a manual read and a bureau pull both miss, and it lands in the expense base that sets DSCR.
An owner-operated business stays scoreable
Draws are the lowest priority in the waterfall and add back into cash flow when the business covers itself before them, so paying the owner does not read as weakness.
Find the risk that never reaches a credit file.
The losses that surprise an SMB book are visible in the account before they are visible anywhere else.
Decline a stacked advance before it defaults
Daily and weekly debits from more than one advance provider at once. It is the strongest default signal in the model and the one rule shipped as a hard decline, firing on about 1.6% of applications. Any advance activity at all routes to review.
Stop on a levy before the cash is gone
A levy means collection is no longer voluntary. It is read as severe distress and it is the signal most lenders configure as an immediate stop.
Catch the statement that does not add up
Uploaded statements are screened for tampering, and the totals are reconciled line by line against the transactions listed, so a doctored file fails before a number is derived from it.
Use the whole analysis. Keep your own credit policy.
Kora scores the file and reports what each signal crossed. The rules that turn that into a decision run on your side, and the result lands wherever you already work.
Drop it into the scorecard you already run
A band on the familiar scale and a calibrated probability, both from the same run.
Explain any score to a committee
The attributes that moved it, each with the value it had on this file.
Every threshold stays yours
A default rule set ships with the model, and your own engine is what runs it.
Take it where you already work
One call into your own system, a dashboard to read the account on, and a page for the credit file.
Credit desk questions.
The ones that come up before a pilot.
01Most of our applicants have no audited financials. Does cash flow underwriting still work?
That is the case it was built for: the business bank account is the real P&L. Bank statement underwriting reads the statements, or a live bank connection, and assembles the revenue, the expense structure and the debt service from the transactions themselves. No accounting software needs to be connected, which matters because most small businesses do not use any.
02How do you separate real revenue from loan proceeds and owner money?
Every inflow is classified into one of three tiers. Card processor settlements, customer ACH, client wires, marketplace payouts and cash deposits are operating revenue and count. Asset sales, insurance proceeds and refunds are tracked but excluded. Loan disbursements, owner equity injections, internal transfers and tax refunds are never counted as revenue, because counting them inflates the very ratio you are underwriting on.
03Can you see merchant cash advance debt that is not on a credit report?
Yes, and it is the signal the default rule set treats most severely. Advance repayments are recognized by their daily and weekly debit pattern and by provider, so concurrent advances from multiple providers surface as stacking. Advance payments are also placed above everything else in the expense waterfall, since that is their real seniority against the account.
04What if the applicant can only give us a personal bank statement?
It is still scored, and the response says plainly that it was scored on limited business evidence rather than presenting the read as complete. Because classification runs on transaction behaviour, a personal account carrying payroll runs, card settlements and commercial rent is analysed as a business anyway. Where there is genuinely no business-side activity the file comes back as a thin one for these purposes, which is usually the point to ask for a business statement.
05How do we know when an analysis is thin rather than just bad?
Every response carries a completeness tier, and confidence is set by the weakest part of the analysis rather than averaged, so one strong component cannot mask a weak one. A blank section and a poor number are also different things: no business activity found reads differently from a business that was analysed and is struggling, and the score treats them as the different risks they are.
06Do we keep our own credit policy, and how do results reach our systems?
You keep it entirely. Kora returns the score, its drivers and the indicator set, and your own rules engine decides what each threshold means for the deal, applied identically to every file. A default rule set ships with the model if you would rather start from ours and adjust. Delivery is a single REST call, plus a dashboard and a PDF for the credit file.
See the DSCR on deals you already funded.
Backtesting is free and needs no contract. Send 200 or more funded deals with the bank statements you had at origination, plus how each one performed, and we’ll return a ranked report of the cash-flow signals that carried the most weight on your own book. Floorplan books welcome: send funded dealer lines and we’ll rank them the same way.