Six weeks of diligence. Collapsed to days.
Banks, asset-based lenders, equipment finance providers, and SBA-preferred lenders underwrite $10–100M asset-heavy operators against backward-looking equipment residual, personal credit, and a manually-reconciled view of the operator's books. The diligence cycle today is 6–10 weeks for ABL, 60–90 days for SBA 7(a). The vault eliminates roughly two-thirds of that cycle — and tightens pricing 50–100 bps by collapsing the field-exam-driven trust gap.
Eleven named lenders with confirmed 2025–2026 activity.
This list is not exhaustive — but it covers the most actively-deploying institutions for $10–100M asset-heavy field service operators in North America. Two clusters: US specialty / SBA-preferred + Canadian government-backed and bank-led. Both sides are competitive on working capital and equipment terms; both sides are slow to underwrite because the operator data they need is fragmented.
The doc list, the metrics, and the timeline — in their current state.
Every lender in this tier requires roughly the same submission package. The variance is in how the package gets assembled, how it gets verified, and how long the back-and-forth takes. Items flagged ⚠ are the ones that are structurally painful for asset-heavy field service operators — not because the data doesn't exist, but because it lives across six fragmented systems and has to be reconciled by hand.
Documents required
- 3 years business tax returns · signed
- 3 years reviewed or audited financials · plus interim <60 days old
- 3 years personal tax returns · plus PFS for any 20%+ owner
- AR aging tied to GL · current + trailing 12 months · the data-scramble that eats two weeks
- Equipment list with serial numbers, residuals · fleet across multiple yards is hardest to reconcile
- Backlog / contracted revenue schedule · signed MSAs vs work orders vs verbal renewals
- Customer list with concentration disclosure
- UCC-1 lien search + payoff letters
- Intercreditor agreement · if subordinated debt or seller note
- Phase I ESA + property condition · 3–6 weeks if real estate collateral
- Borrowing-base certificate · template + dilution analysis
Underwriting metrics
- DSCR floor · 1.20–1.25× minimum · 1.30–1.35× for transitional / asset-heavy
- Debt / EBITDA · 3.5–4.5× lower-middle market · 5.0–5.5× upper-middle (PGIM data: 4.5× first-lien average)
- AR advance rate · 80–85% on eligible
- Inventory / equipment advance rate · 50–60% on eligible
- Customer concentration · flag >20% single customer · >30% triggers tighter covenants
- AR ineligibles · >90 days past due · cross-age >20% · foreign / contra / related-party
- Working capital ratio · current ratio ≥ 1.2× · quick ratio ≥ 1.0×
- Margin floor · stability / improvement across 3 years matters more than absolute level
- EBITDA add-back discount · too many one-time recasts and the underwriter discounts the whole model
▸ Where the 6–10 weeks actually goes
Submission + initial review
Lender requests + collects the doc package. Most of the slowdown here is operator-side: assembling AR aging tied to GL, reconciling equipment list across yards, finding signed MSAs.
Field exam + appraisals
Field exam scheduling 2–4 weeks. Equipment appraisal 2–3 weeks. Phase I ESA 3–6 weeks if real estate. Independent third parties — operator absorbs $15–30K of cost.
Underwriting + committee
Once the file is complete, the actual underwriting is 7–10 business days. EBITDA recasting, covenant negotiation, intercreditor terms. This is where deal terms get set.
Closing + funding
Legal, UCC filings, account control agreements, opening borrowing-base certificate. SBA 7(a) adds 7–14 days. Preferred lenders compress this to 30–45 days end-to-end.
Field exams are sampled assertions. The vault is populated attestation.
A field examiner pulls a sample of receivables, cross-ties them to dispatch, walks the equipment yard, and writes a memo that the lender trusts because the examiner is independent. Continuous attestation does the same job — but populated, not sampled — and cryptographically attested at write. The lender skips the $15–30K field-exam fee. The operator skips three weeks. The lender prices 50–100 bps tighter because dilution risk drops to verifiable zero. Below is the evidence map, item by item.
| Vault evidence (continuously attested) | Replaces (today's process) |
|---|---|
| Hash-chained AR aging tied to dispatch + invoice + cash receiptSaves 2–3 weeks + $15K field-exam fee | Field exam AR test · auditor pulls a sample of receivables, traces each to a dispatched job, confirms collection. Sampled, manual, slow. |
| Margin trace per job + contract quote → dispatched cost → billed → collectedSaves 1 week + recast surcharge | EBITDA recast spreadsheet warfare · operator's controller normalizes one-time events, owner comp, add-backs. Lender discounts heavily. |
| SLA compliance history per customer on-time %, defect rates, response timeConcentration risk discount removed | Customer concentration write-up · narrative argument for why the 35% customer is sticky. Lender prices the trust gap. |
| Contract intelligence NLP on MSAs · renewal dates · auto-renew flags · termination-for-convenienceBacklog becomes auditable, not asserted | Backlog "trust me" PowerPoint · operator-prepared schedule of contracted revenue. Lender either discounts it or sends counsel to review every contract. |
| Supplier concentration log PO history by vendor · category exposure50 bps pricing improvement | Manual supplier disclosure form · operator-prepared list of top vendors. Lender has no way to verify category concentration. |
| Working capital cycle metric DSO / DPO / cash conversion · rolling 13-weekSaves 1 week of treasury workbook | Treasury workbook · operator's controller builds a 13-week cash forecast. Updated quarterly, stale by the time it lands. |
| Dispatch reliability jobs scheduled vs completed vs on-timeOperational risk write-up replaced | Operational risk narrative · interview-based commentary on field-execution reliability. Decision-grade only if examiner is sharp. |
| Equipment utilization + maintenance log hours · service intervals · downtime causesAppraisal narrative section replaced | Equipment appraisal · third-party valuator walks the yard. Residual values + utilization commentary. Sampled across fleet. |
| Technician-of-revenue concentration revenue per top-5 techs · skill matrixKey-person risk write-up replaced | Key-person risk narrative · lender adjusts terms for technician concentration. Hard to verify without a year of dispatch data. |
Data quality moves 50–100 bps. Every time.
Pricing in this tier is anchored to SOFR (currently ~3.59% as of May 2026; Chatham forward curve holds near 3.25% through 2027). The spread is where the operator's data quality lives. Reviewed → audited financials typically saves 50–75 bps. Clean trailing-12 borrowing-base certificates move advance rates from 80% → 85% on AR. Continuous attestation moves both — and adds a third lever the operator has never had access to: real-time covenant compliance attestation.
SOFR + 275–425 bps clean · SOFR + 450–650 bps for hair.
"Hair" means: concentration risk, recast-heavy EBITDA, no audited financials, weak forward backlog evidence, supplier concentration disclosures missing. Continuous attestation removes the hair. 50–100 bps of spread compression on a $5M facility is $25,000–$50,000 of annual savings — every year, for the life of the facility. Over a 5-year amortization, that's $125,000–$250,000 of compounding savings that fund the SaaS many times over.
Six months of attested ledger is enough. Here's the math.
T4 lenders enforce near-term, operational covenants — customer concentration cap, backlog / forward-revenue coverage, gross margin floor, compliance-certificate cadence. None of these require multi-year history. Six months of continuous, hash-chained attestation is enough to underwrite all four, which is why T4 is the first tier to unlock on the vault maturation curve. The covenant slots arrive pre-filled. The lender's job becomes: verify the proofs, set thresholds at close, decision. The 6-week cycle collapses to days because the work is already done — continuously, by the model, before the lender ever opens the file.
For operators today: this is the wedge. A working-capital line, an equipment term, a receivables facility — priced 50–100 bps tighter, closed in days rather than weeks, with the operator skipping the field-exam fee entirely. For lenders today: this is the cohort. Each operator on Allometry is an underwriting opportunity priced from real evidence, not a narrative argument. Same data, two sides of the same transaction.