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Bank statements
Also called business bank statements, bank stips, checking statements.
The months of business checking statements that most non-bank underwriting is actually built on — the primary evidence of revenue, balance behaviour, existing debt and how the business is run day to day.
Drafted with AI assistance. Not yet independently checked. Nobody has verified the claims on this page against a source, so treat the figures and legal points as a starting point rather than as settled, and confirm anything you are about to act on. How we check things.
What it means
For most revenue-based products the statements are not supporting documents. They are the file. Three months is the minimum for a short advance, four to six is common, and six to twelve appears on larger facilities and anything a bank touches.
What an underwriter reads out of them
- Total deposits versus qualifying deposits. Transfers between your own accounts, loan or advance proceeds, owner injections, refunds and reversals are stripped out. What is left is the revenue figure the offer is sized from.
- Deposit count and frequency. A business banking 60 times a month looks different from one banking twice, at the same volume.
- Average daily balance and ending balance, month over month.
- Negative days and NSF or overdraft items. These do more damage to an offer than most owners expect.
- Existing debits. Regular daily or weekly withdrawals of an odd amount are other positions, and they will be identified whether or not you disclosed them.
- Card processing deposits, separated from cash and cheque, where the product cares about split funding.
Format and delivery
Funders want the bank's own PDFs, every page including the blank reverse pages, unedited. Screenshots, spreadsheets and re-saved PDFs get questioned. A read-only bank connection through an aggregator is increasingly required instead of or alongside statements, because it removes the document from the chain entirely.
What counts as a qualifying deposit is not standardised, which is why the same three statements produce materially different approvals at different desks.
Where this one catches people
Two ways this goes badly wrong.
Altering a statement to hide a position, an NSF or a bad month is not a decline, it is a fraud referral. Funders check document metadata, page hashes and internal totals, and they cross-check against a read-only bank connection or a verification of deposit. The industry shares information about it. A doctored statement follows you to every desk, long after the deal you wanted has gone.
Separately: do not give a broker your online banking username and password. A read-only aggregator link that you authorise through your own bank's screen is normal. Handing over live credentials is not — it gives whoever holds them more access than reading, it usually breaches your deposit agreement's security terms, and if money leaves the account afterwards your bank's first question will be who you gave the credentials to.
Worked through
Illustrative. Across three months the gross deposits total 312,000.
Strip a 40,000 transfer in from a savings account, 25,000 of proceeds from a prior advance, and 6,000 of customer refunds reversed back in. Qualifying deposits are 241,000, roughly 80,300 a month, not the 104,000 a month the gross figure suggests.
The same statements also show 46 deposits a month, an average daily balance of 9,400, four negative days and three NSF items in the middle month, and a 312 daily debit running from the 20th of month one — an existing position you did not mention.
A funder sizing at 1.2 times monthly revenue works from 80,300, not 104,000. That is a 96,000 offer rather than 125,000, before anything is deducted for the position it just found.
Figures in the example are illustrative. They show the arithmetic, not a quote — what any one lender would charge is on that lender's page, where it is published at all.
Where you will meet this term
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Bank statements — common questions
What does bank statements mean?
The months of business checking statements that most non-bank underwriting is actually built on — the primary evidence of revenue, balance behaviour, existing debt and how the business is run day to day.
Where does bank statements catch people out?
Two ways this goes badly wrong.
Is bank statements the same as an interest rate?
Bank statements is defined above; if you are comparing it against a rate, check whether the two measures share a time dimension before you put them side by side.
Which products does bank statements apply to?
Merchant Cash Advance, Working Capital, Term Loan, Business Line of Credit, Revenue-Based Financing.
Is there a worked example of bank statements?
Yes, on this page, and it is labelled illustrative. It shows the arithmetic, not a quote from any lender.
What else should I read alongside bank statements?
Average daily balance, Average monthly deposits, Bank statement underwriting, Bank verification, Deposit frequency.
Has this definition been checked?
Not yet. This entry is drafted and live, and the notice at the top says so. Confirm anything you are about to act on.
Is this legal advice?
No. It is a definition. What a clause does in your contract, in your state, is a question for a lawyer licensed where you are.
Can I suggest a term?
Yes — [email protected]. The glossary grows from what people are actually shown in contracts.