What are credit facility deliverables?
Credit facility deliverables are documents or reports that borrowers agree to send to their debt capital providers (either once or on a recurring basis) as part of a credit agreement.
Staying on top of deliverables deadlines and statuses is a crucial part of maintaining access to funding from a credit facility, but it's an operational challenge that tends to be time-consuming and error-prone. Recently, the Finley Engineering team built and launched Deliverables, a capability that helps customers track debt capital deliverable requirements and statuses in an in-app dashboard, with Slack reminders, and via e-mail reminders.
In a previous post, we presented an overview of common debt capital deliverables like borrowing base reports, asset reports, and financial statements, as well as the consequences of missing submission deadlines for deliverables. Here, we'll dive deeper into how software can help borrowers track deliverable deadlines and submission statuses at all times.
How can Finley's Deliverables capability help borrowers manage their credit facilities?
Finance teams have traditionally lacked visibility and insight into their debt capital compliance and reporting obligations. In many cases, they may not know about a debt capital deliverable until their capital provider lets them know that they've missed a deadline!
That's because debt capital deliverables are outlined in credit agreements and tend to be written in language that's hard to parse (and even harder to track). For example, it's common for credit agreements to stipulate that borrowers send capital providers certain kinds of reports "X business days after the end of the month," and to outline the format or sub-components of those reports in disparate sections of the contract.
If you're managing debt capital deliverables manually, you might begin by tracking all relevant deliverables, deliverable formats, and associated date calculations in a spreadsheet or shared calendar. But those tracking tools will go stale, and they won't show you the status of deliverables, which will leave you right where you started: unsure about what you need to send your bank or lender in order to maintain full access to your funding.
We built Finley's Deliverables capability in order to streamline all the reporting tasks associated with credit facility management, and to enable Finance to do more with less. Finley's Deliverables capability provides:
Deliverable-specific deadline information in one place, updated automatically. Because the Deliverables capability is built on top of Finley's Digital Credit Agreement and Calculation Engine, your list of upcoming deliverables will update itself automatically, without you having to comb through the hundreds of pages of your credit agreement for clarification on when, exactly, your servicing report is due, or what documents need to accompany your submission. As you can see above, having a list of all upcoming deliverables can help you assign tasks to your finance team based on the urgency of different reports. Moreover, Finley's Deliverables capability provides you instant access to the credit agreement section reference of each deliverable, as well as the original text of the credit agreement deliverable definition. That way, you know exactly what you're on the hook for.
A central hub for your team and stakeholders to modify and monitor deliverable statuses. Today, most debt capital deliverables are submitted via email, which makes it hard for finance leaders to track the status of different submissions across different email threads. It might not be clear to a CFO, for example, which debt capital deliverables have been submitted or approved and which ones have been waived (this is especially difficult as companies bring on new sources of funding). With Finley, you can see the status of all your deliverables in one place.
Automatic reminders to submit deliverables, both via email and in Slack. Because Business and Engineering teams have to juggle a number of responsibilities and priorities at high-growth companies, it can be easy for debt capital deliverables to get lost in the shuffle. That's why Finley's Deliverables capability includes email and Slack reminders to complete debt capital deliverables. When it comes to debt capital compliance, it never hurts to have an extra pair of eyes on what's due soon.
How will Finley's Deliverables capability evolve moving forward?
At Finley, we're lucky to work with some of today's most innovative fintechs as we roll out capabilities like Deliverables. Their feedback doesn't just inform what we build; it ensures that we're constantly improving and upgrading our capabilities as well. That's especially true when it comes to product modules like Deliverables, which can end up touching a number of parts of organization (e.g., Risk, Accounting, and Compliance in addition to Capital Markets).
Here's Jen, the Finley engineer who led the Deliverables project, on how customer feedback informed the planning, building, and roll-out of the Deliverables capability, and what she's most excited about moving forward:
"Deliverables was designed to make managing reporting capital provider deliverables as easy as possible. We thought customers could use their time in more productive ways instead of having to manually set up their own in-house solution with spreadsheets and calendars, and we knew we could leverage our Digitized Credit Agreements to do that."
"Moving past just having a list of deliverables that you can check off, we also wanted customers to have 'peace of mind' while managing their credit facility, so we added Slack and email reminders to make sure that customers are always up to date about all deliverables coming due at any given time."
"With the lens of 'making reporting as easy as possible,' I’m most excited to slowly move a lot of the back-and-forth communication that’s often buried in emails to the Finley Deliverables dashboard. Automating parts of report generation and streamlining collaboration will be huge quality of life upgrades, making the dream of 'managing your credit facility with a few clicks' a reality."
Want to learn more?
After businesses execute a credit agreement, their challenge shifts from raising debt capital to credit facility management. In other words, they need to turn hundreds of pages of legalese into a discrete set of business and technical requirements/tasks that they can execute and monitor on an ongoing basis. If they're unable to do so, they won't be able to access any of the funding they've secured!
When it comes to tracking debt capital deliverable deadlines and reports, the only way to guarantee timely and accurate deliverable submission is to rely on software designed to surface key reporting deadlines and task statuses.
For a full product overview, check out our Product page. If you're interested in learning more about software that can help you scale your capital markets function and ensure debt capital compliance, just request a consultation with a Finley debt capital expert and we'll be in touch with you soon!