Georgia's commercial financing disclosure requirements under Senate Bill 90

Georgia's commercial financing disclosure requirements came from Senate Bill 90, passed in the 2023 session with an effective date of 1 January 2024. It is a short law with a narrow job: make the provider state the money, and stop brokers charging up front.

What the provider has to tell you

The bill requires a provider to disclose, in connection with a commercial financing transaction:

1. The total amount of funds provided to the business in the transaction.
2. The total amount of funds disbursed to the business after any fees, withholdings or third-party payments.
3. The total amount to be paid to the provider under the terms of the transaction.
4. The total dollar cost of the transaction.
5. A statement of whether there are any costs or discounts associated with prepayment.

Five lines. No annual percentage rate, no term, no payment schedule in the statutory list. Georgia is at the lighter end of the state disclosure regimes, and the gap between line 3 and line 1 is the only price signal you are given.

What the limits on brokers say

The bill also constrains anyone arranging your financing for a fee. A broker may not solicit or collect an advance fee from a business to provide services as a broker. A broker may not make false representations in offering their services. A broker may not advertise services in a publication without disclosing the contact information required.

Separately, the bill deals with unsolicited written inquiries and mailings — including offers to buy real property, which must carry a prominent notice in capital letters that the recipient is under no obligation to respond — and it provides that a brokerage engagement cannot attach a lien or other security interest to real property, with any such attachment void.

Enforcement

The Attorney General enforces the provisions, and the bill carries civil penalties. Georgia's Consumer Protection Division sits within the Attorney General's office and is the body to contact about conduct under these rules. As with Florida and Kansas, expect the remedy to be regulatory rather than a lawsuit you bring yourself, and confirm that in the current text before assuming either way.

What is deliberately not stated here

Two things you may want and this article will not give you, because they could not be confirmed from a Georgia state source: the codified O.C.G.A. section numbers for the disclosure provisions, and the exemption list and dollar thresholds. Several states that legislated in the same period settled on a $500,000 ceiling and a five-transactions-a-year carve-out, but Georgia's own numbers should be read from the current statute rather than inferred from its neighbours. If a funder tells you the Georgia rules do not apply to your deal, ask them to show you the exemption in the text.

How to use five numbers

The Georgia list gives you enough to compute the two things that actually matter, if you do the work.

• Cost as a share of cash received: total dollar cost divided by funds disbursed. Use disbursed, not provided — the difference is money you repay and never held.
• Cost against time: ask, in writing, for the expected number of payments and the payment frequency, and ask what sales assumption produced them. Georgia does not require this on the sheet. A funder that will not put it in an email is telling you something.

With those two figures you can compare a Georgia offer against a bank line of credit or an SBA loan quote in a way the disclosure sheet alone will not let you do. Without them, a total dollar cost is just a number with no denominator.

And treat any factor rate you are quoted as what it is: a multiplier with no time dimension. Illustrative only — 1.28 on $60,000 is $16,800 of cost, and whether that is cheap or ruinous depends entirely on whether you are paying it over six months or eighteen.

Turning the five figures into a comparison, worked

Start with the denominator. Against the $80,000 provided, the cost is 32 cents per dollar. Against the $76,400 you actually received, it is $29,200 of cost — because the $3,600 fee is money you repay and never held — which is 38.2 cents per dollar. The statutory sheet gives you both numbers and does not do that subtraction for you.

Now the missing dimension. Ask for the payment amount, the frequency and the expected count. Suppose the answer is $838 a business day for about 126 payments. That is roughly six months, and 38.2 cents per dollar over six months is a very different obligation from the same 38.2 cents over eighteen.

Then ask the question that makes the count meaningful: what sales assumption produced 126 payments, and what happens to the count if sales come in 20% below it? On a fixed-total product the answer is that the term extends and the dollars do not change. On a percentage-of-sales structure the answer should be the same, but only if reconciliation is a written right with a stated procedure. Get that in the same email.

Where Georgia's sheet leaves you exposed

Three gaps are worth naming, because the disclosure will not close them.

Ask for the broker's position

Georgia's advance-fee prohibition is worth invoking directly. If someone arranging your financing asks for money before funding, say that you understand Georgia restricts advance fees for brokerage services and ask them to identify what the payment is for. The answer, and the speed of it, is informative.

Rules in this area have changed in most states at least once since 2022. Check the current Georgia text before relying on anything above.

This is general information and not legal advice for your situation.