If more than two of these feel familiar, your portfolio’s growth is likely outpacing your operational structure.
- The “One-Person” Knowledge Silo: Your most complex borrowing base reviews can only be performed by one specific person because the spreadsheet logic is too “bespoke” for anyone else to follow.
- The Borrowing Base Rush: Borrower certificates arrive throughout the week, but your team spends all of Friday in “emergency mode” just to update availability, leaving little time for actual credit analysis.
- The “Hidden Row” Anxiety: Before a month-end report or an exam, analysts spend hours “scrubbing” workbooks to ensure no old data or broken formulas are hiding in the background.
- Reporting Lags: It takes your team more than 48 hours to provide an accurate “risk-at-a-glance” view of the portfolio because the data has to be manually aggregated from multiple sources.
- High-Level Churn: You are losing junior or mid-level talent to competitors not for better pay, but because they are tired of being “data-entry clerks” in a role they thought was about finance.
The Hidden Costs of Manual Borrowing Base Work
ABL lenders often treat manual data entry as a fixed cost of doing business, when it’s actually a variable risk that compounds with every new borrower added to the portfolio.
When an analyst spends six hours a week manually reconciling borrowing bases, the cost isn’t limited to their time. You are also absorbing the risk of inevitable data-entry errors, resulting in over-advances against cross-aging or slow-moving inventory. Furthermore, you’re paying a quieter cost: the disengagement of your most capable people.
You hired your team for their judgment, but they’re spending their time on data entry. High-level credit analysts don’t leave because the work is demanding; they leave because the work becomes clerical.
The most expensive cost, however, is opportunity loss. While your team hunts for broken links in spreadsheets, they aren’t analyzing deteriorating aging trends, shifting inventory turns, or the early warning signals that actually protect the portfolio.
What Mature ABL Operations Do Differently
The most effective ABL teams don’t eliminate judgment; they protect it. Analyst time is treated as a finite risk-control resource, not an administrative buffer.
In mature operations, data collection and calculation are infrastructure, not artisanal work. Borrowing base logic is standardized, transparent, and consistently applied across the portfolio. Files are ingested once, calculations are repeatable, and changes are traceable. Analysts are no longer responsible for making the numbers work; they are responsible for understanding what the numbers are saying.
The result is not less rigor, but more of it—applied where it actually matters.
The Bottom Line
Attention is finite. When it’s consumed by low-level troubleshooting, higher-value surveillance disappears.
Standardization does not replace judgment, but it does clear the administrative noise so judgment can be applied where it matters most. If your team is stuck in clerical work, you’re losing time, and the ability to see the next credit event before it happens.
