> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.amlok.io/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# SMB lending benchmarks

> Evaluate small-business financing with reconciled operating evidence and product-specific outcomes.

Define the business-size cohort before comparing results. Revenue, employee count and outstanding credit are different size measures. Keep legal entities, facilities and owner guarantees linked without treating a business group as several independent observations.

## Financial-risk measures

| Measure | Definition and comparison rule |
| - | - |
| Cash-flow coverage | Supported cash available for debt service divided by scheduled debt service over the same period. State tax, owner-draw and exceptional-item treatment. |
| Revenue quality | Reconcile invoiced or commerce revenue to payments, settlements and bank receipts; report refunds and unmatched amounts. |
| Liquidity | Available cash, near-term obligations and seasonality measured at a dated cutoff. |
| Concentration | Largest customer, supplier and channel shares using an explicit revenue or exposure denominator. |
| Credit outcome | Delinquency, charge-off, cure and recovery by financing product and origination vintage. |

## Public benchmark sources

[ISED's 2024 credit-condition findings](https://www.ised-isde.canada.ca/site/sme-research-statistics/en/small-business-credit-condition-trends-2014-2024) report an **89% debt-financing approval rate** and **91% of requested debt dollars authorized**. These are different denominators. Neither is a borrower repayment-performance measure.

AMLOK's [public-record corpus](https://docs.amlok.io/research/datasets.md) includes US SBA loan-program observations and Canadian financing disclosures. The [completed SBA baseline](https://docs.amlok.io/research/public-results.md) supplies measured evidence for its stated structured-loan task. Its program population and features do not establish Canadian SMB transaction-understanding performance.

## AMLOK evaluation

Test account-to-business associations, economic-event deduplication, revenue reconciliation and reproducible financial ratios. Hold out businesses and related entities across time. Compare bank-only evidence with authorized accounting, commerce and payment evidence on the same eligible cohort.

Report predictive performance by industry, size, product, vintage and evidence coverage. Score Signal on newly supported changes and false alerts per business-month. Financing proceeds must not become operating revenue, and a new data connection must not become an apparent growth event.

Use the [business underwriting protocol](https://docs.amlok.io/research/business-underwriting.md) and [shared benchmark contract](https://docs.amlok.io/research/industries/index.md#benchmark-contract).


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