By Kaylan Pepin, CPA, CMA, Co-founder and CEO of Levr.ai. Kaylan spent his career in commercial banking at RBC, CIBC, and BDC before building Levr.
If you only prepare one document before applying for business financing, make it this one. Bank statements are the first thing almost every lender asks for, and often the document that decides how fast your application moves.
What they are
A bank statement is your bank’s official monthly record of everything moving through your business account: deposits, withdrawals, payments, fees, and your running balance. Lenders typically ask for the most recent 3 to 6 months, and for larger facilities sometimes 12.
Why lenders ask for them
Statements are the closest thing to ground truth about your business. Financial statements can be prepared many ways, but bank activity is what actually happened. Underwriters use them to verify your revenue matches what you claimed, to see whether cash flow is steady or lumpy, to check your average daily balance, and to spot how much existing debt you’re already servicing.
How to get yours
Download official PDF statements from your online banking portal, one file per month. Avoid screenshots, transaction exports, or spreadsheets: lenders want the bank-generated PDF with your business name and account number visible, because those are hard to fake. If you bank somewhere without downloadable statements, request them from your branch before you start applying.
The red flags underwriters look for
Four patterns slow applications down: NSF or overdraft incidents (even one or two recent ones raise questions), negative balance days, large unexplained deposits (which trigger source-of-funds questions), and daily payments to other lenders that reveal undisclosed debt. None of these is automatically fatal, but surprises are worse than disclosures, so if a lender will see it, mention it first.
Which loans require bank statements
Nearly all of them. They’re central for merchant cash advances and lines of credit, where cash flow is the whole underwrite, and standard for term loans, equipment financing, and invoice financing. See the full picture in what documents you need for a business loan.
The Levr shortcut
On Levr, you upload your statements once and our AI reads them to fill your application, and every lender you apply to works from the same file. No re-sending the same PDFs five times. Get started free.
Last reviewed July 2026.