Debt schedule

A table of every loan a business or borrower owes, showing for each the lender, balance, payment, maturity date and collateral.

A debt schedule lists what a borrower owes, one row per loan. A lender uses it to total the yearly payments, see what falls due soon, and find which assets are already pledged.

SBA publishes a suggested layout, Form 2202. Its columns are the creditor’s name, original amount, original date, current balance, whether the debt is current or delinquent, maturity date, payment amount and how the debt is secured. SBA notes that the schedule should balance to the liabilities on the balance sheet. The form has no column for the interest rate; adding one answers a question before it is asked.

SBA’s loan rules show why it matters. They define debt service as the future required principal and interest payments on all business debt, including the new loan, and say that to analyze coverage a lender should obtain a current debt schedule prepared by the borrower, including any shareholder debt.

Example: three loans with payments of $2,000, $3,500 and $1,500 a month are $84,000 of existing debt service a year. Add $60,000 for the new loan and the business needs cash flow of $165,600 to reach 1.15 coverage.

Leave nothing off. A debt on the credit report or a lien search that is missing from the schedule slows the file and costs trust.

Go further

• DSCR calculator: Coverage from cash flow and the payments on your schedule.
• Deal summary builder: A one-page summary a lender can read.
• DSCR calculator: Cash flow over debt service. Type the cash flow and the loan terms, see the ratio and the cushion before it falls to 1.00x.
• Deal summary builder: Turn the facts of a deal into a clean one-page summary you can copy or print. Nothing is saved or sent.
• What a lender-ready loan package looks like: A lender decides in minutes whether to keep reading. A package that answers the first five questions on one page, and backs each answer with a document, gets read.
• SBA 7(a) loan package checklist: A 7(a) package is the bank's usual file plus SBA's own list. Know which items SBA requires and you can have them ready before the first call.
• Global cash flow, explained step by step: A property can cover its loan while the people behind it cannot cover their other debts. Global cash flow is the test that looks at all of it at once.

Related terms

• Debt service coverage ratio (DSCR): Net operating income, or business cash flow, divided by the loan payments due in a year. It shows how many dollars come in for each dollar of debt service.
• Global cash flow: The combined cash flow of a borrower, its owners and their other businesses, set against all of the debt payments those same parties owe.
• Contingent liability: A debt a person or company would owe only if something happens, most often a guaranty of someone else's loan that the borrower then stops paying.
• EBITDA: Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization: a business's operating profit before financing costs, income taxes and non-cash charges.
• Term loan: A business loan for a set amount with a maturity of more than one year, repaid on a fixed schedule from the company's cash flow.
• Line of credit: A commitment from a lender to advance money up to a set limit, which a business can draw, repay and draw again as its cash needs rise and fall.
• UCC lien: A lender's claim on business assets other than real estate, made public by filing a financing statement under Article 9 of the Uniform Commercial Code.
• SBA Form 413 (Personal Financial Statement): SBA's personal financial statement. Each 20 percent owner and each guarantor except a supplemental guarantor gives one, or the lender's own equivalent, signed and dated within 90 days.

Plain definitions for orientation, not legal, tax or credit advice. A lender's own policy decides what it will do.