When the Numbers Don't Tell the Whole Story
We had a client come to us recently through a referral from her accountant. We'll call her Jenny, because her privacy matters more than the details of her business.
Jenny is self employed. Her business works on quarterly head contracts, which is a pretty normal way to operate if you're in that kind of industry. It works fine, until it doesn't.
Over the Christmas period in 2025, her head contracts were delayed. That happens every year to some extent, business slows down, people are on leave, things take longer to sign off. But this time, the contracts came back with changed payment terms attached. The result was that Jenny had no income at all for the entire January to March quarter, right up until the new terms were applied.
For any business, that's a serious hit. For a single mum running her business solo, it was more than a cash flow problem. It was months of real, personal stress on top of the business stress.
While all this was happening, the ATO liabilities kept ticking over in the background. BAS payments came due. Her 2025 income tax fell due too. And because her 2026 financials weren't finished yet, any lending application was going to need to go in as alt doc.
Here's the problem with that. Alt doc lending already asks more questions than a standard application. Add a quarter with zero income sitting right there in the numbers, and you've got a red flag that's hard to ignore on paper alone.
Our first instinct, the safe instinct, was to wait. Wait until October, get two consistent quarters of BAS behind her, and go to the bank with a clean run of numbers. It's the textbook answer. It ticks the box.
But I sat with that for a bit, and it didn't sit right.
Waiting until October meant the application wouldn't actually be submitted, let alone settled, until November. And every month we waited was a month the ATO had to move on issuing a director penalty notice. It was also another three months of Jenny carrying stress she didn't need to be carrying, wondering if the ground was going to keep shifting under her.
So instead, we did something different. We wrote to the bank and told them the truth. Not just the numbers, the actual story. What happened over Christmas, why the contracts changed, why the quarter looked the way it did. We had a letter from her accountant backing all of it up. We gave the bank a real person and a real set of circumstances, not just a spreadsheet with a gap in it.
That consolidation loan was approved today.
It gets Jenny back on top of her ATO position, avoids any risk of default, and puts her lending into a far more comfortable spot than where she's been sitting. We've also mapped out an exit plan to refinance her onto a better lender within the next twelve months, once her financials catch up and reflect the business she's actually running.
Sometimes the fastest, safest looking path on paper isn't the one that actually protects your client. Sometimes the job is believing in the person in front of you, and being willing to put that belief in writing to a bank. That's what we did for Jenny, and it's the kind of brokering we'll keep doing.
