Time in Business

The measurement is deliberately impersonal. A funder checks the incorporation or registration date with your secretary of state, cross-checks it against the age of your business bank account and your EIN, and takes the earliest date it can verify as the start of the clock. Nothing about that process asks how long you have done the work, only how long this legal entity has been doing it.

Every funder sets its own minimum, and the differences are real rather than arbitrary. Banks and SBA lenders sit at the strict end, where a couple of years of history is a common comfort line. Revenue-based funders weigh recent deposits far more heavily and can work with files measured in months. That spread is why a business declined in one place is funded in another with the same statements, a pattern why funding applications get declined unpacks.

The thresholds encode loss history rather than opinion. A funder that has watched deals written at four months go bad draws its line at six or twelve, and that line is a fact about its own portfolio rather than a judgment about your business, which is exactly why the lines differ from shop to shop and why no amount of persuasion moves one. What funders mean by time in business requirements covers the thresholds in detail.

For your file, this is the qualifying factor you cannot improve today, which makes it the one to plan around. A young business is not shut out; it is routed. The realistic shelf narrows to revenue-based funding sized to recent deposits, equipment financing secured by the equipment itself, and personal-credit-based options, with the cheaper products opening as history accumulates. Who funds businesses under six months old is the honest version of that map, and the funding estimator gives you a planning range in about a minute.

The confusion worth clearing is time in business versus your own experience. Twenty years of running kitchens does not age a restaurant you opened in March. Underwriters weigh owner experience, but it lives in a different part of the file and it does not move this number.

The second confusion is registration versus operation. Registering an entity years ago and only starting to trade last spring does not usually buy you the earlier date, because the bank statements will not support it, and claiming otherwise on an application is the kind of discrepancy that ends deals on trust rather than on math. The date to give is the one the record will confirm.