Your application was declined and nobody told you why.

You applied. It came back no. The reason you were given was a sentence that explained nothing, or there was no reason at all.

Most people take that as a verdict on the business. It usually is not. Files fail on one line, and you are almost never told which line.

Why you were told so little

The reasons are internal. They can be awkward to put in writing. And the person who wrote your decline has eleven other files on the desk that afternoon.

So the letter says what letters say, and you go away believing the problem was the idea, or the market, or you. Usually the problem was the file. Those are different problems and only one of them is fixable this quarter.

What usually stops a file

Four things account for most of it. None of them is about whether your business is any good.

Verification. Before anything reads a single number, it confirms you are one consistent business. The legal name on the registry, the name on the bank account, the name on the invoices, the address on file. Those have to agree. They very often do not, for boring reasons, and when they disagree everything stops there.

Remittances. If you have employees, there is money passing through your account that was never yours. A late supplier is a commercial dispute. A late remittance is money the government already considers theirs. It escalates faster than anything else on a file and converts into a lien sooner than most owners expect, and a lien is close to an automatic decline no matter how clean the rest looks.

Personal credit. Under about $100,000, the lender is partly underwriting you and not only the business. Something you consider ancient history is often still visible and still weighted. Most people find out what is on their own file at the worst possible moment.

Gaps. A missing quarter with nothing next to it explaining what happened does not read as absence. It reads as a question. And in a credit file, questions do not get declined, they get set aside while somebody waits for an answer nobody asked you for. That is why files go quiet.

One message worth sending, today

There is a version of this you can do yourself before you spend anything.

It works because it asks for one thing, it releases them from defending the decision, and it can be answered without disclosing anything internal.

Two rules if you send it. Send it once and do not follow up. And when an answer comes back, write down their words rather than your paraphrase, because the paraphrase is where the useful part goes missing.

When that is not enough

Sometimes the answer comes back vague. Sometimes it does not come back at all. Sometimes it comes back specific and you still cannot tell which part of your file it is pointing at.

That is what the File Diagnostic is for. You upload the file you sent them. A person reads it the way a credit analyst reads it and writes down what stopped it, in priority order, with the fix for each. Five business days, $149, one written round of questions.

Not sure the file is worth a review yet? The free readiness check takes four minutes and tells you which stage the file is at.

What this is not