Which funding products does this apply to?

Working Capital, Term Loan, Business Line of Credit, SBA Loan, Asset-Based Lending. Each has its own page listing the funders in this directory that offer it and what each one publishes about its terms.

Are the figures here quotes?

No. Every worked example is labelled illustrative and exists to show the arithmetic. What a particular lender charges is on that lender's page, where it publishes it at all.

The Find Me Funders research desk. Some drafting is AI-assisted, and every page that is says so at the top, including whether a person has checked its claims yet.

How do I know a figure here is right?

Where a page carries the green notice, its claims were checked against the sources listed at the end and a reviewer is named. Where it carries the amber one, nobody has verified it yet and you should confirm anything you plan to act on.

Are the examples real deals?

No. Every worked example is labelled illustrative and exists to show the arithmetic. What any particular lender charges is on that lender's page, where it publishes it.

Why do you never say what a typical rate is?

Because we cannot source it. A market average assembled from lenders who do not publish prices is a guess with a decimal point on it. Where a lender publishes a figure, we show that figure and say where it came from.

Is this financial or legal advice?

No. It is general information about how these products work. Outcomes depend on your contract and your state, and a lawyer or accountant licensed where you are is the person to ask about your situation.

Can I reuse this content?

Quote a paragraph with a link back. Do not republish whole articles.

Building a chart of accounts an underwriter can read

The structure you set once decides how many questions arrive later. Most small-business charts are either three accounts deep or two hundred accounts wide, and both cause the same problem.

By Find Me Funders research desk Updated 14 September 2026 1055 words 5 min read

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.

Set up once from a default template and never revisited, your account list quietly decides what every financial statement you will ever produce can and cannot show. It is the piece of accounting infrastructure with the longest reach and the least attention paid to it. An analyst reading your P&L is trying to answer a short list of questions, and whether they can answer them from your statement or have to ask you depends almost entirely on decisions made in that list.

Two failure modes. A chart so shallow that revenue, cost of sales and expenses are three lines, so no ratio can be computed and no trend can be explained. Or a chart so wide — two hundred accounts, one per vendor — that the statement is unreadable and nothing sums to anything meaningful. The target is in between: enough structure to answer the standard questions, few enough lines to fit on a page.

The questions your chart has to be able to answer

What is gross margin, and has it moved?
What does the owner take out, in total, and in what form?
What are the fixed monthly costs that continue regardless of sales?
What does debt cost, separated from what debt repays?
What is one-off and what recurs?
Where does revenue come from, if there is more than one stream?

If your current statement cannot answer all six without a phone call, the chart needs work.

The cost-of-sales line, and why it decides your file

Illustrative only —revenue of 980,000 with a single cost-of-sales account of 612,000 gives a gross margin of 37.6 percent. If 96,000 of that account is shop rent and vehicle running cost — overheads that do not vary with a unit sold — then true cost of goods is 516,000 and gross margin is 47.3 percent. A 9.8 point swing, decided by three account placements.

Gross margin is benchmarked harder than almost any other figure because it is the fastest read on whether a business has pricing power and whether its cost base is under control. Getting the boundary wrong in either direction costs you. Overheads sitting in cost of sales understate margin. Direct labour sitting in overheads overstates it, which is worse, because when the analyst rebuilds it the correction comes with a credibility cost.

The test for each account: if I sold one more unit tomorrow, would this cost rise? Materials, direct labour, subcontract, freight in, merchant processing fees on sales, direct commissions — yes. Rent, insurance, admin salaries, software, vehicles used for general purposes — no.

A structure that works for most small businesses

Revenue.One account per meaningful stream, not per customer. A repair shop separates labour from parts. A restaurant separates food, beverage and catering. Three to six accounts. Add a contra-revenue account for refunds, discounts and allowances rather than netting them against sales invisibly — a discount rate that is quietly growing is worth seeing.

Cost of sales.Mirror the revenue streams where you can, so margin is computable stream by stream. Keep merchant processing fees here if card sales are a meaningful share, because the fee genuinely varies with sales.

Payroll.Split into gross wages, employer payroll taxes, benefits, and — separately, on its own line — officer or owner compensation. That last account being visible on the face of the statement removes an entire round of questions, and hiding owner pay across three departments never helps, because the add-back analysis needs it and the analyst will ask.

Occupancy.Rent, utilities, repairs and maintenance, property insurance. If you rent from an entity you or a relative own, that rent belongs in its own clearly named account. Related-party rent is a standard add-back candidate and it is far easier to argue when it is already separated.

Other operating expense.Insurance, professional fees, software, marketing, vehicles, travel, office. Ten to twenty accounts is plenty. Use a description rather than a separate account for anything that happens twice a year.

Below the operating line.Interest expense, separated from principal. Depreciation and amortisation on their own lines. One-off or non-recurring items in named accounts — legal settlement, insurance claim, relocation cost — so they can be identified and removed from a run-rate rather than argued about.

Balance sheet.A separate account per bank account, per card and per loan. A liability account per financing obligation, named for what it is. An equity section that distinguishes owner contributions from distributions from retained earnings.

Two structural choices that save more time than extra accounts

Use classes, locations or departments rather than duplicating accounts.If you run two sites, you do not need two rent accounts. You need one rent account and a location tag, so you can produce a consolidated statement and a per-site statement from the same data. Duplicating accounts per site doubles the chart and makes the consolidated view unreadable.

Keep the numbering scheme conventional.Assets in the 1000s, liabilities 2000s, equity 3000s, revenue 4000s, cost of sales 5000s, expenses 6000s. Nothing depends on it technically, and everything depends on it socially — an accountant, a bookkeeper or an analyst opening your file recognises the shape immediately.

Changing a chart that is already wrong

Do not renumber mid-year. The comparative columns break and every prior statement becomes unreproducible.

Make the change effective at a year end where possible, or at a quarter end if the current structure is actively costing you.
Map old accounts to new ones in writing, one line each, and keep the map.
Merge rather than delete. Most systems let you merge an account into another, which carries the history; deleting orphans it.
Restate the comparative period using the same mapping, so the first statement under the new chart shows like against like.
Re-run the three tie-outs afterwards — cash to statements, revenue to deposits, debt to the debt schedule — because a merge done carelessly moves balances you did not intend to move.

What to have ready

A one-page account list, grouped, that you can send with the statements. An analyst who can see the structure will accept the statement's own subtotals. One who cannot will build their own, and their version of your gross margin is the version that goes to committee.