8 Industries Underwritten Differently for Business Debt Consolidation Loans

The Grid Exists and Almost Nobody Publishes It

Every lending desk keeps an industry grid built out of its own charge-off history, and your business meets that grid as a code in the intake screen before a human opens a statement. The code does one of three things. It moves the offer up a rate band, it shortens the term, or on a narrow set of codes it produces a decline no amount of revenue argues with. The honest version matters more than the drama: for six of the eight industries below the adjustment is price and paperwork rather than exclusion, and the two hard refusals are better documented than the folklore suggests.

This page is built the opposite way from the industry pages that currently rank, which describe a vertical warmly and then hand it the lender list they hand a florist. Each entry states why the underwriting genuinely differs, what the file must carry that other files do not, and which product classes verifiably welcome or restrict the code, quoted from the lender’s or the agency’s own published page. Where a list is not published, and most are not, the entry says so rather than guessing at one.

1. Trucking and Logistics: The Receivable Was Already Sold

A carrier’s file opens from a position no other applicant starts from. The freight bills are usually assigned to a factor long before the first advance funds, so the oldest financing statement on the state index belongs to that factor rather than to any lender the owner is about to meet. A consolidation desk that wants those receivables is looking at an asset already contracted elsewhere, with brokers and shippers directed by notice to pay someone else. The adjustment is not a rate band, it is a collateral conflict that predates the statements.

Both directions are verifiable from published pages. Value Capital Funding’s bank-placed consolidation program posts 13% to 22% APR, terms to 10 years, a 640 across all three bureaus, one year in business, and $100,000 in revenue with positive net income. The same page excludes transportation and logistics by name. SOP 50 10 8 closes the other side, since merchant cash advances and factoring agreements are both ineligible for 7(a) refinancing, and those are the two instruments most carrier stacks are assembled from. OnDeck’s restricted list, read in August 2026, never mentions trucking.

Beyond three months of statements, the file needs the factoring agreement with its notification and buyout language, titles and payoffs on every owned tractor and trailer, and a UCC search read in filing order rather than by name. The full treatment of a carrier’s options, including which equipment structures fund and what a factor-to-factor exit costs across a year, sits on our page covering consolidation loans for trucking companies.

2. Restaurants: The Collateral Is Bolted Into a Leased Building

A restaurant balance sheet is hood systems, walk-ins, line equipment, dining furniture and leasehold improvements, and all of it sits inside real estate the operator does not own. The SBA’s collateral adjustment table prices that problem directly. Used or existing machinery and equipment counts at no more than 50% of net book value, or 80% with an orderly liquidation appraisal, and furniture and fixtures count at no more than 10% of net book value. A build-out that cost $400,000 three years ago supports a small fraction of that figure in a secured file.

The lease becomes the second underwriting document, and most operators have never been told so. Under SOP 50 10 8, once $500,000 or 30% of the proposed collateral, whichever is less, consists of leasehold improvements or equipment attached to leased real estate, the lender obtains the written lease. The term, counting only renewal options the borrower alone controls, should equal or exceed the loan term. Where the lender cannot get an assignment of lease and a landlord’s waiver, that hardens from should to must, so four remaining lease years and a ten-year request do not survive one file.

The deposit column explains the rest. Card volume arrives daily and the processor sits between revenue and the account, which is the plumbing the advance industry built itself on, so an underwriter reading a restaurant statement expects split funding and looks for it. Bring the lease with every option spelled out, processor statements alongside bank statements, and a point-of-sale export by daypart. Restaurants appear on no restricted list verified for this page, so the usual answer is price rather than refusal.

3. Construction: A Surety Sits Ahead of Your Lender

Progress billing turns a contractor’s receivables aging into a document that reads better than it collects. On federal fixed-price construction, FAR 52.232-5 directs the contracting officer to authorize a progress payment in full where satisfactory progress was achieved, and permits retention of a maximum of 10 percent where it was not. Private owners write their own retainage percentages into the contract. Money that is earned, invoiced and withheld still shows in the aging as though a lender could reach it.

On bonded work the lender’s position is worse than junior. Pearlman v. Reliance Insurance Co., 371 U.S. 132 (1962), holds that a surety which paid the laborers and materialmen is subrogated to their claims against the retained fund, and that the fund does not pass into the contractor’s bankruptcy estate for general creditors. The surety there had paid roughly $350,000 and took the entire $87,737.35 withheld. A blanket filing over accounts collides with that doctrine, so a competent desk discounts a bonded contractor’s receivables rather than advancing against them.

The bonding relationship then runs back through the new loan. A surety underwrites working capital and equity, and the SBA’s own bond guarantee program, reaching contracts up to $9 million non-federal and $14 million federal for a fee of 0.6% of the contract price, still requires the contractor to meet the surety’s credit, capacity and character requirements. A consolidation that fixes the monthly payment can shrink the bonding line that produces the work. Both SBA lines built for contractors are closed here: Contract CAPLine proceeds may not refinance existing debt, and Builders CAPLine repeats it.

4. Medical and Dental: The One Vertical a Big Bank Names

Bank of America’s healthcare arm is the only corner of a national bank shelf where the phrase appears as a marketed purpose. Practice Solutions serves dentists, veterinarians, physicians and optometrists, and its dentist page lists “Consolidate debt. Improve your cash flow by consolidating bills into one low monthly payment” among the reasons to borrow, with a Preferred Rewards discount of 0.25% to 0.35% by tier and a callback within two business days as the application channel. Neither page publishes a rate or an amount. Our page on what Bank of America actually offers maps that shelf.

The structural counterweight rarely appears on any practice-financing page. Under 42 C.F.R. §424.73, Medicare does not pay amounts due a provider to any other person under assignment, power of attorney, or any other direct payment arrangement. The exceptions are narrow: a government agency under the Assignment of Claims Act, a court-ordered assignment, and a billing agent whose pay is independent of amounts billed or collected. The receivable generated by the largest payor in the country cannot be pledged the way a distributor pledges an invoice.

Healthcare lending is therefore cash-flow and practice-value lending wearing a collateral coat, and the file shows it. Bring payor mix with the government share broken out, credentialing status, the professional entity structure and who may own it under your state’s law, associate agreements with their restrictive covenants, and the equipment schedule with lien positions. The quiet risk is personal goodwill, since a solo practice’s value largely walks out with the practitioner, which is why the guaranty does more work in this vertical than the operatory equipment ever will.

5. Retail and E-Commerce: The Card Networks Vote First

A retailer’s revenue arrives through an acquirer, and the acquirer answers to monitoring programs that can end the revenue. Stripe’s published summary of those programs, current as of August 2026, puts Mastercard’s Excessive Chargeback Merchant tier at 100 to 299 disputes with a rate of 1.5% to 2.99%, and the high excessive tier at 300 disputes and 3%. Visa’s Acquirer Monitoring Program treats a 0.5% ratio as non-compliant and 1.5% as excessive in the United States. A desk underwriting your deposits is underwriting your right to keep accepting cards, and that right belongs elsewhere.

Platform balances then complicate the payoff. Shopify Capital funds with “no credit checks, and no guarantors”, is issued by WebBank, and is repaid “with a fixed percentage of your store’s daily sales, but only on days you make sales” across a maximum 18-month term. Eligibility rests on 90 days of selling on the platform. From the platform’s chair that underwriting is nearly free, because it holds the sales ledger and the payout rail. From a consolidation lender’s chair it is an obligation with no bureau trade line and no ordinary payoff letter.

Inventory does less work here than owners expect. The OCC’s Comptroller’s Handbook on asset-based lending, version 1.1 dated January 27, 2017, describes retail inventory traditionally advanced at 80% of net orderly liquidation value and inventory generally at up to 65% of book value. The SBA’s Working Capital CAPLine caps eligible inventory at 50%. Assemble processor statements showing the dispute ratio, payout reports channel by channel, an inventory listing at cost with aging, and an honest read on single-marketplace dependence.

6. Staffing: Payroll Leaves Weekly, the Invoice Pays in 60 Days

Gross wages, employer payroll taxes and workers compensation premiums leave a staffing firm every week or two while the client invoice ages 30 to 60 days. The business therefore consumes cash fastest at the moment it wins work. The declining balance curve an underwriter would read as deterioration in a retail account is ordinary arithmetic here, and the desks that lend into staffing know the difference while generalist scoring models often do not. That mismatch, rather than any published exclusion, is why staffing owners get inconsistent answers from lenders quoting identical criteria.

Customer concentration is the number that decides the file. The SBA’s CAPLines rules exclude from the eligible receivables base any single customer above 20% of total outstanding receivables unless one of five narrow conditions is met, and make every account of a customer ineligible once that customer is delinquent on more than half its invoices. The OCC’s asset-based lending handbook runs tighter. It treats a single account at 10% or more of the portfolio as a concentration, holds concentrated accounts to 10% to 20% of the borrowing base, and describes cross-aging clauses that turn one bad client into a fully ineligible relationship.

Then there is the liability no consolidation loan is permitted to retire. 26 U.S.C. §6672 makes a person responsible for collecting and paying over withheld employment taxes personally liable for a penalty equal to the amount that never reached the government. SOP 50 10 8 separately forbids using loan proceeds to pay past-due federal, state or local payroll taxes or similar trust funds. The obligation most likely sitting under a distressed staffing firm is exactly the one the cheapest available money cannot touch.

7. Auto Dealers and Repair: Redlined on One Side of the Lot

OnDeck publishes the clearest restricted list in this market, framed on its own page as lending to over 700 industries with some it cannot serve, and the vehicle trade takes a remarkable share of it. New car dealers, used car dealers, motorcycle, ATV and all other motor vehicle dealers, boat dealers, recreational vehicle dealers and manufactured home dealers all appear by name. Auto repair appears nowhere on the same list. One published document, two businesses that often share a parking lot, opposite answers.

The reason is what a dealer’s assets already secure. Titled inventory is financed by a flooring line that holds the collateral and audits the lot, and each retail sale generates an installment contract sold to a bank, so the receivable leaves at closing rather than aging into a borrowing base. The SBA does not help either, because floor plan financing is a prohibited use of 7(a) proceeds under 13 C.F.R. §120.130. A buy-here-pay-here operation then meets 13 C.F.R. §120.110(b), which allows a business financing its own credit sales only where less than 50% of revenue comes from that financing.

The service bay underwrites like any other small business, on card and fleet-account deposits, on lifts and alignment racks with genuine auction value, and often on the real estate underneath. A dealer file needs the flooring agreement with its curtailment schedule and audit rights, the revenue split of any related finance company, and title status on every unit; a repair file needs the equipment schedule and the lease. Check which side of the line your code lands on before paying for an application, because a coded decline is not a judgment anyone reconsiders.

8. Cannabis and the Federally Restricted Set: The Answer Is No

This is the entry where candor costs us nothing and saves you weeks. SOP 50 10 8 makes ineligible “a business that grows, produces, processes, distributes, or sells marijuana or marijuana products, edibles, or derivatives, regardless of the amount of such activity”. It extends that to sellers of smoking devices primarily intended for marijuana use, then adds that the rule “applies to recreational use and medical use even if the business is legal under local or state law where the Applicant is or will be located”. Marihuana remains listed in Schedule I at 21 U.S.C. §812(c).

Banks stay out for a reason more concrete than squeamishness. FinCEN guidance FIN-2014-G001, issued February 14, 2014, sets three filing categories. Under the first, an institution serving a fully compliant operator files a Marijuana Limited suspicious activity report on that customer for the life of the relationship, stating only that no additional suspicious activity was identified. A permanent filing obligation attached to a performing account is a cost most credit committees decline to carry. Value Capital Funding lists cannabis among its consolidation exclusions, and OnDeck names drug dispensaries.

The tax code finishes the analysis. 26 U.S.C. §280E denies any deduction or credit to a trade or business trafficking in Schedule I or II substances, so taxable income is computed off gross profit and the cash flow a coverage test would measure is distorted before an analyst opens the model. Hemp has a real carve-out where the crop meets section 297A of the Agricultural Marketing Act of 1946 and any applicable state definition. What remains for a plant-touching operator is state-chartered institutions carrying a full compliance program, specialty lenders at private-credit pricing, and real property.

What the Grid Costs You, and the Option That Ignores It

One measurement is worth carrying out of this page. Fora Financial runs separate landers for transportation, construction, medical and retail, and all four publish an identical bar: six months in business, $240,000 or more in annual revenue, a 570 FICO, no open bankruptcies and no other active financing. The medical page’s own disclaimer then says approval depends on criteria including credit history, cash flow, revenue consistency and industry-specific underwriting rules. The published bar is deliberately industry-neutral while the industry rules stay unpublished, which is the honest state of this market in August 2026. Our page on how these loans get underwritten ranks that handicap against the rest of the file.

There is one path where the code matters far less, and it is also what we do. Delancey Street is a business debt settlement company rather than a lender or a law firm, and licensed attorneys in its nationwide network negotiate balances down instead of refinancing them at par. Files that network works have typically resolved in the 30 to 60 percent range, which is disclosed experience and not a prediction about yours. A funder deciding whether to discount weighs the defects in its own paperwork and what a fight would cost, and none of that turns on an industry code. The boundary runs the other way too. An operator with one modest position and a lender already saying yes should take the loan, and should take advice from counsel before changing how existing debits are paid.

Who Should You Call? Our Top-Rated Business Debt Firms

One firm on this list works the entire lifecycle of a business debt file, from stopping the daily debits through attorney-led negotiation, UCC lien removal, and a signed release. The other two cover broader debt categories that often sit alongside the advances. Choose accordingly.