Across ABL platform evaluations, the current state is starting to look familiar: clean demos, messy borrower packages, eligibility rules split across credit agreements and spreadsheets, controls sitting outside the platform, and teams trying to decide how much work can safely move into an AI-capable system.
This scorecard is designed to do more than compare vendors. Use it to capture the current operating condition behind each answer: where the work happens today, what lives in spreadsheets or email, which controls sit outside the system, who owns the review, and what would need to change for the platform to carry the work.
Every Yes should produce evidence. Every Partial should produce scope. Every No should produce a decision. Every note should help answer one question: what use case did this evaluation just uncover?
Run each item against a real borrower package, not a prepared demo.
Use the notes field to capture what was shown, what stayed outside the system, who owns the control, and what would need to be resolved before signature.
Before scoring, choose one borrower package your team already knows well.
For each item, capture:
| 01 Collateral intake and lifecycle | ||
| Bring collateral into the system once and carry the same record through diligence, field exam, underwriting, and ongoing monitoring, without re-keying it at each stage. | ||
| Run the same collateral through repeated tests over time, diligence, field exam, and periodic review, rather than treating each cycle as a separate one-time upload. | ||
| Using your standard BBC template, show what the system extracts, which values require analyst confirmation, how corrections are retained, and whether the next cycle improves or resets. | ||
| Ingest a messy borrower or agent file and convert it to your required data format, mapping each field with its source value shown for an analyst to confirm. | ||
| Accept borrower and broker submissions through a portal, and compute ineligibles on submission with each value traceable to source for analyst review. | ||
| When the borrower submits or calculates ineligibles through the portal, show what the borrower can control, what the lender reviews, how exceptions are approved, and where the final eligibility decision is retained. | ||
| Auto-populate sales, credits, and the AR rollforward from the file instead of re-keying. | ||
| Run one borrowing base across multiple segments (AR, inventory, equipment, real estate), with the line items named and pooled to your structure. | ||
| Support named asset classes beyond the basics, such as cash collateral, marketable securities, or IP. | ||
| 02 Eligibility and ineligibles | ||
| Configure your eligibility rules on your actual credit agreement terms, reconcile the output to your current calculation, and document any rule that still requires a spreadsheet, manual judgment, or implementation scope. | ||
| Apply the full ineligible set on the AR line: cross-age, contra, foreign, related-party, government, past-due, over-credit-limit, over-concentration. | ||
| Configure cross-age as a two-part rule (a line-item percentage plus a category) so a debtor tips fully ineligible once it passes the cutoff. | ||
| Support percentage-based and calculation-based ineligibles, including credit-insurance-driven ineligibles. | ||
| Compute dilution as a supporting AR measure. | ||
| 03 AR aging and dating | ||
| Age receivables and recalculate ineligibles and concentration on every upload. | ||
| Calculate eligibility on a single aging and on multiple agings, including invoice-date and due-date aging on the same receivable, and test each. | ||
| 04 Advance rates and reserves | ||
| Configure advance rates per segment or line item, to the required significant digits, and support rates over 100% where the structure calls for it. | ||
| Build reserves as a fixed amount or a percentage, applied above the line or against collateral, the line, or both. | ||
| Support seasonal advance rates, seasonal limits, and step-down schedules. | ||
| 05 Caps, sublimits, pools, and concentration | ||
| Enforce sublimits that cap an individual collateral segment. | ||
| Enforce caps on caps: macro limits that roll several sublimits into a higher facility cap, calculated together. | ||
| Build collateral pools: pool like collateral and cap the pool as part of total availability. | ||
| Enforce percentage-based facility limits. | ||
| Enforce a per-debtor limit that caps a single debtor across every line it appears in. | ||
| Recalculate concentration across full aging on every upload, configurable to a top-N or as the credit requires, and flag a breach for a decision. | ||
| 06 Facility structures and multi-entity | ||
| Support FILO tranches (first-in, last-out) within the facility. | ||
| Run multiple borrowing bases that roll up to parent or consolidated totals. | ||
| Produce your own back-leverage (lender-finance) borrowing base to your funding bank from the same collateral you monitor, on your reporting cycle. | ||
| Track collateral in multiple currencies and convert into the line currency. | ||
| 07 Inventory | ||
| Handle inventory eligibility down to the location and SKU level, with location-specific ineligible coding. | ||
| Treat inventory categories (for example bulk versus case) as separate line items in the same base. | ||
| Support NOLV or appraisal-driven inventory caps. | ||
| 08 Availability and output | ||
| Produce a lender-side availability calculation from the borrower's support files, compare it to the borrower-submitted BBC, and explain every material variance by source, rule, reserve, cap, ineligible category, or reviewer decision. | ||
| Calculate net availability end to end: gross collateral less ineligibles, reserves, and caps. | ||
| Generate the borrowing base certificate and availability output from the source data. | ||
| 09 Lender-versus-borrower comparison | ||
| Calculate your own base when the borrower submits theirs, and show both side by side with the variance flagged by line item. | ||
| Set a rule for which figure governs: yours, the borrower's, or the lesser of the two. | ||
| Explain the variance by category (ineligible, reserve, cross-age, concentration, debtor treatment). | ||
| 10 Monitoring and controls | ||
| Show what collateral signals the platform monitors between BBC cycles, where the data comes from, who receives the exception, what action is expected, and whether the alert changes availability, review priority, or documentation. | ||
| Log every override and exception (force-eligible or force-ineligible) to an audit trail instead of deleting it. | ||
| Route preparation, review, approval, override, and exception decisions through role-based queues, with maker/checker control, timestamped evidence, and a retained explanation for any change to availability. | ||
| Provide ticklers for past-dues, financials, and document requests, with owner, due date, and status. | ||
| 11 Participations | ||
| Run a participation waterfall for interest and principal collections and distributions, with a residual check that forces full distribution. | ||
| Track daily participant balances and FX by participant across term and revolver participations. | ||
| Provide participant reporting and settlement. | ||
| Give participants a login portal to retrieve their reporting on demand, not only on a push cycle. | ||
| 12 Reporting and audit trail | ||
| Report collateral by asset class, with collateral-analysis views and an ABL dashboard for exposure, availability, and utilization. | ||
| Lock confirmed entries, log exceptions, and write one timestamped historical balance per loan per day that recalculates on any backdated change. | ||
| 13 Operating-model reflection | ||
| Identify which current spreadsheet, email, or manual control this platform would replace, and which would remain after go-live. | ||
| Show how the work changes by role: borrower, collateral analyst, approver, portfolio manager, field exam, and credit officer. | ||
| Show where AI-assisted preparation, mapping, comparison, or monitoring enters the workflow, and where human review remains required. | ||
| Show how an examiner, auditor, credit officer, or portfolio leader would reconstruct one availability number from source file to final approved BBC. | ||
| Classify every item marked Partial as configuration, implementation scope, manual control, roadmap dependency, or unsupported gap. | ||
| State the decision implication: proceed, proceed with scoped conditions, pause for proof, or remove from consideration. | ||
After scoring, select the three to five items that created the clearest evidence, gap, or operating-model question. For each one, capture the following.
By the end of the scorecard, you should have: