Getting your bank statements assessment-ready

Bank statements are the whole assessment for a facility this size. Not the application form, not the forecast, not the story — the statements. They are the only document in the file the business did not write about itself, which is exactly why a credit team reads them first and reads them closely.

Why six months

Six months is long enough to show a seasonal shape and short enough to still describe the business as it trades today. Three months can hide a quarterly cycle or flatter a quiet patch. Twelve tells us about a business that may no longer exist. Six is where the signal is.

If the business banks across more than one account, six months means six months of all of them. A single account from a business that runs three is not a shorter application; it is an incomplete one, and it is the most common reason we come back asking for more.

What a credit team actually reads

Not the balance. Five things, roughly in this order:

• Revenue, and how steady it is. Consistent deposits from a spread of customers read very differently to the same total arriving from one payer once a month.
• The closing balance pattern. Where the account sits in the days before wages and the days after tells us more about headroom than any single figure.
• Dishonours and overdrawn days. A cluster of them says the account is already being run to the edge, which is where a new repayment would have to fit.
• Existing facilities. Regular debits to other lenders are visible whether or not they are declared, and declaring them reads far better than not.
• ATO activity. Payments to the ATO, and their absence, both tell a story. See ATO payment plans vs short-term finance.

The four things that slow an application down

In order of how often we see them.

• Statements that are not the bank’s own export. Screenshots, phone photos, accounting-software exports and spreadsheets all have to be re-sourced. Only the bank’s PDF carries what we need to verify it.
• Missing accounts. Trading across several accounts and supplying one. We will find the transfers to the others, and then we have to ask.
• Gaps in the run. A missing statement period, or a set that stops eight weeks before the application. The run has to be continuous and it has to come up to the present.
• Unexplained transfers between related entities. Not a problem, and very common in group structures — but unlabelled they look like revenue that is not revenue, and someone has to ask before the file can move.

How to export them properly

Log in to business online banking, choose statements or documents rather than transaction history, select each account, set the range to the last six full months plus the current one, and download the bank’s own PDFs. One file per account per month is fine; one continuous file per account is better. Do not rename them in a way that loses the account number.

If a statement is password-protected, send the password separately. If an account was opened part-way through the six months, say so — a short history is a fact to work with, not a gap to explain away.

What we do not do

We do not ask for your online banking credentials and we do not screen-scrape. Bank statement verification here means reading the PDFs you send us. It is slower than a feed and it is the trade we prefer to make.

With a clean six months across every account, most of the assessment is arithmetic. Check your eligibility when you have them together.