What lenders actually look at

Credit, time in business, revenue, documentation, and the age of any negative marks: the factors behind most funding decisions.

For document-based business products (lines of credit, term loans, equipment financing, SBA), the same handful of factors drive most decisions.

The factors

Personal credit profile. For these products TK generally looks for 650 or higher.
Negative marks. Late payments, collections, and charge-offs matter less as they age; ideally they are two or more years old.
Time in business and revenue, shown through bank statements and, for larger requests, tax returns.
Documentation. The more the product depends on documents, the more the file has to tell a clean story.
Existing debt relative to income or revenue.

What this means for you

If one factor is weak, the others can carry a file, and a different product may fit better. If several are weak, fixing the profile first usually produces a better outcome than applying anyway. TK Capital Solutions is a funding brokerage, not a lender. Requirements vary by lender and program; nothing here is a promise of approval, amount, or timing.

Credit score is the headline, not the story

Across the document-based products - line of credit, term loan, equipment financing, SBA - the guideline most lenders start from is a personal credit score around 650 or better. But a score on its own decides very little. Two applicants at 700 can get completely different answers, because what sits behind the number is what gets read.

What sits behind it: how much total credit you already have, how much of it you are using, how long the accounts have been open, how many were opened recently, and whether anything has gone wrong lately.

Recent problems weigh far more than old ones

This is the factor people underestimate most. A charge-off from four years ago and a missed payment from four months ago are not treated the same way, even if the score looks similar. Underwriters read the last twelve months closely and the years before that much more loosely.

The practical guideline across our document-based programs is that negative items should ideally be at least two years old. Recent late payments, collections or charge-offs make a file harder to place even when the score has recovered.

The business side of the file

For anything decided on documents rather than profile, four business numbers do most of the work:

Revenue - not just the total, but whether it is steady or lumpy.
Profitability - a business with revenue and no margin is a harder file than a smaller business with a real one.
Time in business - how long the entity has actually been operating and filing.
Existing debt - including any merchant cash advance balances, which weigh heavily.

Cash flow ties them together. A lender is trying to answer one question: after everything else this business already owes, can it comfortably carry one more payment?

What gets asked for, and when

Smaller and moderate requests are often decided mainly on business bank statements plus basic entity information and identification. Larger requests - roughly the 200,000 dollar mark and above, depending on the lender - move into a fuller review: business and sometimes personal tax returns, a year-to-date profit and loss statement, a balance sheet, and a debt schedule.

Knowing that in advance is worth more than it sounds. The files that stall are almost never the weak ones - they are the ones where nobody warned the client what was coming.

What this does not mean

None of the above is an approval requirement. They are the patterns behind most decisions. Individual lenders and programs set their own standards, every file is evaluated on its own, and nothing here guarantees funding, an amount, a rate or a timeline.

Common questions

Is 650 a hard cutoff?: No. It's the range where document-based business products generally become realistic. Below it, other products or credit work may fit better.