Four Numbers Decide Most Business Loan Applications
Most US business lenders check four things: your personal credit score, your monthly revenue, how long you've been trading, and the debt you're already carrying. At FundBetter a typical approval starts around a 500 personal credit score, roughly $15,000 in monthly revenue, and six months in business, evidenced by three to six months of business bank statements rather than a tax return.
Those are FundBetter's thresholds rather than an industry standard, and that distinction is what catches owners out. No national floor exists, so the same business can be declined in the morning and approved in the afternoon, and a decline from one lender tells you very little about your odds with the next. The bar you're failing is usually a specific, nameable thing rather than a general verdict on your business.
What a Lender Is Really Underwriting
Every question on an application is evidence toward one thing: whether this business will still be generating enough cash to make the payments through the end of the term. Credit, revenue and tenure are three different ways of asking it.
The evidence lenders lean on hardest is consistent across the industry. In the FDIC's 2024 Small Business Lending Survey report, which publishes its 2022 survey of roughly 1,300 banks, personal credit scores and a willingness to offer collateral or guarantees were the two items more than 80 percent of banks evaluated for most or all of their small business loans, regardless of loan size. The same survey found that on smaller loans, 59 percent of large banks treat credit bureau information as the single most important part of an application, against 11 percent of small banks.
That gap explains why outcomes vary so much. A large bank running an automated model is mostly reading a score. A community bank is reading your financial position and usually meeting you in person. An online lender sits closer to the first, which is why the numbers below are published and specific rather than negotiable case by case.
Personal Credit Follows You Into the Business
Nearly every small business lender pulls the owner's personal credit rather than the company's. Business credit files are thin or absent for most companies under a few years old, so the owner's history is the only record there is to read.
Lenders set their own floors here. FundBetter's usually sits around a 500 personal credit score, and the check at application is soft, so finding out where you stand doesn't cost you points. That sits well below what a bank will accept, and it reflects a different weighting: revenue carries more of the decision here than the score does.
A score isn't a verdict on your business. It's a summary of how a set of accounts have been paid. Two owners running near-identical shops can sit eighty points apart because one carried a card balance through a bad quarter, which is the whole reason a whole category of revenue-weighted funding exists at all.
Revenue, and the Deposits That Have to Prove It
Revenue is where an online lender does most of its underwriting. FundBetter's typical starting point is around $15,000 in monthly revenue, and the evidence is your business bank statements rather than a tax return, which is part of why a decision can come back inside a day.
Consistency matters more than the peak. Twelve months averaging $18,000 reads better than three months at $40,000 and nine at $6,000, because the payment has to clear in the quiet months too. Frequent overdrafts and negative balance days count against you more than a modest average does.
Two details catch people out. Revenue means deposits into the business account, so a company running personal and business money through one account has no clean number to show. And existing debt is read from the same statements: daily or weekly payments already leaving the account reduce what a lender believes you can add.
Time in Business, and the One Product That Bends It
Six months is FundBetter's usual minimum, and it exists for a plain reason. Underwriting a payment history requires a payment history. Under six months, most products close, and the ones that stay open change what they are looking at.
The exception is selling your unpaid invoices, which opens at three months in business because approval leans on your customers' creditworthiness rather than your own. If you invoice solid business customers on net terms, the age of your company matters less than the quality of the names on those invoices.
The bar moves the other way too. Financing a machine against its own value wants a year of history. Longer terms and larger amounts want two years, because a lender committing for five years wants to see you survive more than one cycle.
Where the Bar Moves From Product to Product
Treating requirements as one set of numbers is the most common mistake. They're per product, and a business that misses on one is frequently a straightforward approval on another.
| Product | Time in business | Revenue | Personal credit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Line of credit | 6+ months | $15K+ monthly | 500+ |
| Short-term loan | 6+ months | $15K+ monthly | 500+ |
| Merchant cash advance | 6+ months | $15K+ monthly card sales | 520+ |
| Revenue-based financing | 6+ months | $15K+ monthly, consistent | Revenue-weighted |
| Equipment financing | 1+ year | Quote for the equipment | 500+ |
| Invoice factoring | 3+ months | B2B invoices, creditworthy customers | Customer-weighted |
| Long-term loan | 2+ years | $500K+ annual | 700+ |
| SBA loan | 2+ years | Profitable | Strong |
Read that table as a map rather than a scoreboard. An eight-month-old shop at 540 with $20,000 a month has no path to long-term business loans at 700 credit and a clear path to a short-term business loan. Both facts are true at once.
The Documents You Will Actually Be Asked For
The paperwork is lighter than most owners expect, and knowing the list in advance is the difference between funding in a day and funding next week.
- Three to six months of business bank statements. The core document. Everything about revenue and existing debt is read from these.
- A completed application with your legal entity name, tax ID and time in business.
- Proof of ownership and identity, usually a driver's licence and the entity filing.
- A voided business cheque or account details for funding and repayment.
- Card processing statements, only if you're applying for a merchant cash advance.
Tax returns and full financial statements come up for larger amounts, longer terms and anything backed by an SBA guarantee. For working capital under a day, bank statements usually carry it.
Clearing Four Bars Out of Five
Missing one requirement is the normal case, not the failure case. What matters is which one, because each has a different answer.
If the score is the gap, revenue-weighted products are built for exactly that and price the risk instead of refusing it. If tenure is the gap and you invoice business customers, factoring reads their credit rather than your age. If revenue is the gap, the honest answer is usually to wait, because borrowing against income you don't have yet is how a funding problem becomes a solvency problem.
If existing debt is the gap, adding another payment is the wrong move and consolidating the ones you have is often the right one. A lender worth dealing with will tell you that rather than stacking another advance on top. It's also worth knowing how a credit line gets approved before you need one, since an open line costs nothing to hold and takes the emergency out of the next application.
Find Out Which Bar You Clear
Reading a requirements list only gets you so far, because the answer depends on numbers that are already sitting in your bank statements. A short conversation settles it. Talk to a funding advisor about your revenue, your time in business and your score, and you'll get a straight answer on which products are actually open to you and which aren't worth the application. Checking involves a soft credit pull, offers commonly run from $5,000 to $5 million, and you can reach the team on 786-882-2705.
