Insights

Most small business debt is backed by a personal guarantee, which makes a household balance sheet the collateral. Merchants get monitored daily. Guarantors get looked at once, at origination.

Total revenue growth at the top 100 accounting firms rose from 10.4 to 12.8 percent. Organic growth fell from 7.8 to 7.0. The entire acceleration was bought, and the benchmark moved with it.

Revolving credit is growing at nearly twice the pace of everything else, and 75 percent of small business owners funded the business on personal credit in the past year, up from 49 percent in 2024.

Synthetic identity, bust-out and application stacking are the three fastest growing fraud types, and none of them are visible in one lender's own file. The defense is recall, not detection.

Services business activity jumped to 59.1 in July while the services employment index fell to 47.4. Demand keeps expanding and the payroll that delivers it keeps contracting.

Across small business applicants, 42 percent received the full amount sought and 36 percent received some or most. The partially funded group carries an unmet need, a completed file, and no owner.

Thirty percent of accounting professionals name manual data cleanup as the top barrier to advisory work, ahead of staffing. The average firm runs ten applications and loses five hours a week to re-entry.

Equipment finance small ticket volume is up 25.8 percent year to date against 11.3 percent for the industry. That growth arrives as file count, and a back office charges by the file.