The debt model lenders expect to see.
Behind every lender pack sits the model — the workbook the IM, the deck and the credit memo all draw their numbers from. This page sets out what that model is, what its outputs have to show a credit team, and three pages of specimen outputs, built on a fictional borrower, to download and read.
A three-statement model built around the debt.
Lenders expect a three-statement model in Excel — profit and loss, balance sheet and cashflow, properly linked — monthly through the forecast period and annual beyond it, with the historicals tied to the audited accounts and any difference bridged. What makes it a debt model is what it carries on top: the full debt schedule with interest and amortisation, the covenant tests with headroom through the forecast, the monthly liquidity walk, and the drivers built to flex so a downside can be run in the room.
The model is the single source of every number in the pack. Each exhibit in the IM, each chart in the deck and each metric in the credit memo renders from the same workbook, which is what keeps the pack consistent to the pound across every document a lender reads.
Cash, covenants, and a forecast that survives.
A credit team runs the model for cash and covenants. They want to see the cash available to service the facility in every month, not just the year-end position; the headroom against each proposed covenant through the whole forecast; and where the forecast steps up, the drivers that make the step deliverable. They will build their own downside, so the model has to let them — key drivers exposed and flexible, not hard-coded into the statements.
The common failure is a model that is internally inconsistent or cannot survive a sensitivity. That reads as a business that does not know its own numbers, and it costs credibility that is not recovered. A model that balances, ties to the accounts and holds together under stress does quiet work for the whole process: every subsequent question gets answered from a source the lender has already learned to trust.
The outputs, not the workbook.
The specimen below shows what the model behind the pack produces: the base-case output table and selected workbook renders — the debt schedule, the covenant tests, the monthly liquidity walk and the scenario grid — on the same fictional borrower as the rest of the pack, Northstar Components, a £10.5m refinancing. No real company, no live mandate, and nothing in it is an offer or advice.