borrowing base

A $60 million hardware reseller closed an asset-based line on an $8.30 million borrowing base. The first field exam tested the same collateral and found $6.88 million, and planned headroom of $1.80 million fell to $382,000.

Advance rate is the number every borrower asks about and the last one applied. Before it touches anything, the ineligibles come out, and on a $6 million receivables ledger they can remove $2.2 million without a single invoice being bad.

Two facilities quoted 75 basis points apart. Once field exams, appraisals, collateral monitoring and the finance team's own hours are counted, the cheaper-looking one costs 82 basis points more to run. The gap reverses entirely.

Two recurring-revenue companies each report $6.0 million of ARR. One is offered a $2.0 million facility and the other $1.0 million. The difference is contract length, and it does not appear in any metric either company reports.

Asset-based finance was estimated at more than $6.1 trillion on 2024 data and projected to reach $9.2 trillion by 2029. Inside it are mandates written for contracted and intangible cash flows rather than for hard assets.

A ten-month job billing $100,000 a month withholds $100,000 by closeout. At builder margins near 11 percent that is almost the entire profit on the job, and a standard receivables facility gives you nothing against it.

A distributor doing $40 million in revenue needs $6 million. Read against cash flow it is short. Read against its assets it clears. Read as a blend it borrows $8.2 million. Same company, same week, three answers.

Median gross revenue retention for private B2B SaaS fell from 88 to 84 percent in 2026, and the top quartile fell just as far. For a company planning to borrow against contracted revenue, that four point move is a borrowing base question.

Two facilities priced 200 to 250 basis points apart in the same week. The difference was collateral, not credit. Why acquisition debt sized only on EBITDA leaves both pricing and capacity on the table.

Sixty percent of online-lender borrowers paid more than they expected. The gap is not about lender type. It is about what the borrower verified before the process started.

Asset-rich operators tightening through rising costs often borrow against the wrong thing. Why a cash-flow line caps capacity the balance sheet could exceed, with the numbers.