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Written by
Katherine Gustafson
Edited by
Dawn Daniels
Updated on:
Content was accurate at the time of publication.
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If your business carries debt, it’s important to be able to quickly monitor your obligations. A business debt schedule allows businesses to track and visualize their debts in order to make informed decisions about business growth, cash flow analysis and payment strategies.
A business debt schedule is a table that lists your monthly debt payments in order of maturity. It helps you track cash flow and make informed, strategic decisions about paying off debt and potentially taking on new small business loans.
You’ll want to list all long-term business debts, including:
- Loans
- Mortgages
- Lines of credit
- Credit cards
- Leases
- Bonds
- Debentures
Short-term business expenses — such as accounts payables, payroll and real estate taxes — are usually excluded from a debt schedule. Such obligations, like payroll and taxes, are instead accounted for on your business’s balance sheet. Keeping debt separate from these short-term expenses allows financial managers to get accurate accounting of the company’s longer-term debt burden.
How to make a business debt schedule
When you begin to make a debt schedule, list out all the relevant details of the debt, including:
- Creditor or lender name
- Origination date of the debt
- Original debt amount
- Current balance
- Interest rate
- Monthly payment
- Security or collateral pledged
- Maturity date
Including every aspect of the debt allows for informed decision making about how to strategically manage business debt. You may also want to include notes, such as the reason for the loan or other information pertinent to the lender or the repayment process in your debt schedule.
Making your own business debt schedule is simple using Excel or Google Sheets. The templates below are good resources to get you started.
- Small Business Administration. The SBA has a free downloadable PDF, available on the SBA website.
- Zions Bank. This Excel business debt schedule template is straightforward and easy to use.
- CommunityWorks Carolina. This nonprofit organization offers a free Excel-based template available at this link.
- Pursuit Lending. This New York-based SBA lender offers a fillable PDF template
- Bank of America. BoA offers a straightforward, fillable debt schedule template.
Business debt schedule example
Let’s take a look at a debt schedule for a fictional company that has several kinds of debt: a loan backed by the Small Business Administration, an auto loan, invoice factoring and equipment financing. For each debt, the schedule lists the type of debt, the creditor, the debt’s original amount and date, how much the company still owes, the interest rate and monthly payment, what collateral secures the debt and when the debt will be fully paid (maturity).
| Debt type | Creditor | Origination date | Original amount | Current balance | Interest rate | Monthly payment | Security | Maturity date |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SBA loan | CDC | 10/3/23 | $200,000 | $183,417 | 4.5% | $2,073 | Retail store | 10/3/33 |
| Auto loan | Local credit union | 1/1/22 | $20,000 | $12,776 | 5.5% | $258 | Truck | 1/1/30 |
| Invoice factoring | Online lender | 8/1/21 | $35,000 | $20,708 | 7.5% | $668 | Invoices | 8/1/26 |
| Equipment financing | National bank | 5/1/17 | $50,000 | $26,132 | 6.25% | $663 | Equipment | 5/1/25 |
| TOTALS | N/A | N/A | $305,000 | $243,033 | N/A | $3,662 | N/A | N/A |
This chart provides an at-a-glance look at all the debt this company carries, how much they’re paying to service it each month and when it will all be paid off. Maintaining an overview of this information is essential for business money management.
Keeping a debt schedule is useful to get a bird’s-eye view of all your debts and construct a business cash flow analysis. In addition to monitoring financial obligations, using a business debt schedule offers multiple benefits to your business:
- Stay current with debt payments: A debt schedule lets you see all the amounts that you owe each month, at a glance. This is one of the tool’s most important functions, since there is little worse for your business’s finances than paying your debts late or forgetting to pay them entirely.
- Keep your books accurate: Having all the information about your debts easily accessible is a good way of ensuring that your debt schedule matches your other bookkeeping methods. For example, interest expenses listed in the debt schedule will inform your income statement and principal repayments listed there also appear on your cash flow statement.
- Negotiate better rates: When you’ve established a record of prompt payment on an outstanding loan, you may be able to negotiate a lower interest rate through a refinance. The debt schedule lays out which loans have the highest rates and monthly payments, information that can help you target your refinancing efforts.
- Strategize payments: A debt schedule can help you see the strategic benefit of paying certain debt off early. You can assess which of your debts to pay off first if you have the means to fast-track any of your repayments.
- Make borrowing decisions: Knowing whether you can afford to borrow more depends on knowing your total debt and monthly payments. If a potential new loan doesn’t fit into this financial picture, you’ll know right away if you should hold off until your financial picture improves.
- Provide accurate information: The data on your debt schedule can be used in various ways to inform potential new lenders, creditors and even prospective buyers about your business’s financial details. Having this data in one place helps you pull the appropriate reports easily.
- Monitor your business’s financial health: The debt schedule is a key part of the larger picture regarding how your company is faring financially. If the totals for balances and monthly payments are too large, you’ll be able to see that immediately and figure out a plan to bring those numbers down.
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On this page
- What is a business debt schedule?
- How to make a business debt schedule
- Debt schedule templates
- Business debt schedule example
- Uses for a business debt schedule
