Banker's Guide to New Small Business Finance: Venture Deals, Crowdfunding, Private Equity, and Technology, + Website

Preface

My introduction to the real world of banking, beyond lofty finance courses taken in college, was found on my first bank office desk in a stack of pages filled with columns of blank grids, matched with an adjacent column of accounting terms on the left side of the pages. These papers were spreadsheets, designed to be populated with numbers found in the hundreds of business financial statements collected by the bank from clients as obligated through their loan agreement covenants.

Behind these sheets were musty stacks of file folders of varying age, size, and degree of disorganization, which contained evidence used by the bank previously to decide whether to make each loan. Many of them actually had multiple financial statements inside while many were missing any such information.

My new purpose in life became to open and read every one of these financial statements and transcribe them by hand and pencil, writing every number from every financial account listed into the corresponding grid in every client file’s respective spreadsheet. My hand began to ache just thinking about the task ahead. Should I have majored in economics?

These spreadsheets were organized to detail up to four years’ balance sheets on the front side and four years’ income statements on the back side, with succeeding years listed from left to right. At the bottom of the back side was space for calculating some financial ratios to measure working capital, liquidity, and leverage. Still more impressive ...