Pre-underwriting financial readiness — books that hold up when a lender looks at them.
Why this exists
A lender never meets your business. They meet your financial statements, and they assume the two are the same thing. When the books are rough, that assumption costs you — not because anyone thinks you're hiding something, but because sloppy records almost always make a business look smaller and less profitable than it actually is.
So the numbers get questioned, the file slows down, and the offer comes back below what the business could have supported. I go through your file the way the reviewer will, fix what can be fixed, and hand you a plain-language memo on where you stand. It's addressed to you. Share it with your lender if you choose to.
What I usually find
Understates the top line
If money lands in your account after Stripe, Shopify, Amazon or a broker has taken their cut, and you record what landed, your sales are being reported after fees. A business doing $2M can show up as $1.85M. The lender sizes the deal off the smaller number.
Wrong month, wrong picture
Work done in March but paid in May shows up as a May sale. A year of insurance paid in January hits January. Individually harmless, together it makes your monthly results jump around for no real reason — and lenders read those swings as instability.
The first thing they check
Accounts that have never been matched to the statements line by line. It's usually the very first test a reviewer runs, and when it fails they stop trusting everything else in the file.
No real margin
Shipping, materials, contractors and software all landing in one general bucket. Nobody can tell what it costs to deliver the thing you sell, so nobody can tell whether you make money on it — which is most of what an underwriter is trying to work out.
Understates your earnings
The truck, the phone, the trip, the family member on payroll. These are normal and often legitimate, but if nobody has separated them out, they just read as costs and your profit reads as lower. There's a proper way to present them, and it's worth real money.
Can't be verified
Transfers between your companies, money you put in or took out, a loan or a lease that appears in the numbers with no paperwork behind it. Lenders don't assume the worst, but they can't approve what they can't verify.
The pre-underwriting round
Fifteen minutes, no charge, to see whether this makes sense for you at all.
Balance sheet, profit and loss, trial balance, twelve months of bank statements, and your corporate documents. Read-only access to your accounting system if that's easier.
I go through it the way an underwriter will, then correct what's correctable within the included time — reconciliations, categorization, presentation and supporting schedules.
Where you stand overall, what a lender will stop on, what each issue does to your numbers, what I corrected, and a fixed price for anything still outstanding. Five business days from a complete file.
$1,250 USD, fixed
Includes up to six hours of corrections. Invoiced on delivery.
Some problems are bigger than six hours — rebuilding a year of records, restating your sales, reorganizing your accounts. Those get identified in the memo and quoted separately at a fixed price, never open-ended. The cap is there so nothing structural gets waved through as cosmetic.
Background
I've worked in audit at a Big Four firm and at a boutique one, with clients ranging from owner-run businesses to large multinationals. That range is the useful part — I know what each end needs, and where the gaps and the risks tend to sit.
Today I'm a financial controller overseeing multiple entities, and most of what I build is systems that run on their own rather than work done by hand every month.
I've also been an owner and an investor in ecommerce. I know what it feels like when cash is tight, and I know why early books are messy — founders are trying to get the business running, not maintain a chart of accounts. Nothing you send me is going to be the worst I've seen.