Commercial lending
Before you can assess the deal, you have to build the picture.
A commercial file arrives as forty documents describing a group nobody has ever drawn. This tool reads the pack and draws it, then tells you what credit will ask.
In development with practising commercial brokers. The demonstration on this page runs on a fictional group.
Every complex file starts the same way.
Financial statements for four entities. Two trust deeds, one varied in 2019. A PPSR search you have not read yet. Three years of tax returns. An application form that describes the structure in two lines and gets one of them wrong.
Before you can form a view on serviceability, you have to work out what the group actually is.
That work is not billable, and it is not optional.
The things that kill a commercial deal are rarely visible in a summary.
Already registered, ranking ahead of the facility you are writing.
Drawn from the company, with no complying agreement on file.
Owed to a corporate beneficiary and never paid.
None of these appear on a balance sheet as debt. All of them change the answer.
Reading the documents is not the difficult part.
Holding four different relationships in your head at once is. Each runs on its own logic, and they rarely point the same way.
Ownership
Who holds the shares and the units.
Control
Who is trustee, and who is appointor. In a discretionary trust, a different question to ownership, and the one most often skipped.
Security
Which financier holds what, over which asset, in what priority.
Guarantee
Who stands behind whom. Often the opposite direction to ownership.
A group with six entities has more relationships than most people can hold without drawing it. That is not a failure of attention. It is arithmetic.
What it does.
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1
Reads the pack
Statements, returns, trust deeds, ASIC extracts, PPSR searches, loan documents. Including the scans.
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2
Builds one structure
Every entity and every relationship: ownership, control, security, guarantee, cash flow.
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3
Draws it
An interactive map. Select an entity and every exposure connected to it traces, with the numbers alongside.
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4
Reviews it
What needs answering before the file goes to credit, graded, each point naming its source document.
It does not make the call. It makes sure you are making it with the whole picture in front of you.
The Hartley group is not real.
A fictional civil contracting group in Adelaide, built with the shape of a real file. Six entities, two directors, three financiers, eighteen findings. Every figure is invented.
Three things are worth finding when you open it.
- Select David Hartley.
He stands behind five facilities. His sister, who owns half the trading company, stands behind one.
- Select the Rostrevor residence.
The family home supports a commercial facility. The client may not know.
- Read the serviceability section.
The same accounts support adjusted earnings of $1,153,000 or $851,000, depending on which add-backs survive.
Fictional group, synthetic figures, no sign-up. The demonstration states this again inside.
Where this is up to.
The underlying tool is in use with a financial adviser. The commercial lending version is being built with practising brokers, because the review logic is only as good as the expertise behind it.
If you write commercial deals and want to see it run against a real file, get in touch. What I am after is your view on what matters when a file goes to credit.
The same engine has other applications, in financial advice and estate planning among them. This page is about lending.
Nothing on this page or in the demonstration is credit advice, financial advice, or legal advice. The tool surfaces what to check. It does not conclude.