ABL Field Exam Data Room: The Reports and Software Exports Borrowers Should Prepare

If you have been through an asset-based lending field exam, you already know where the friction is. It is almost never the examiner being unreasonable. It is the borrower's controller spending day one of a three-day exam re-running reports, hunting for a clean cash-receipts export, and explaining why the aging the examiner was handed does not tie to the general ledger. The exam slows down, the findings get more conservative because the data is messy, and the report that lands on the lender's desk reflects the scramble as much as the collateral.

Here is the reframe that fixes it: an ABL field exam runs on data, and almost all of that data already lives in systems you operate every day — your ERP or accounting platform, your AR subledger, your inventory system, and your bank's reporting portal. The examiner is not asking you to build anything new. They are asking you to export what you already have, in a form that reconciles cleanly. A borrower who assembles a tidy field exam data room before the examiner arrives turns a defensive, file-chasing exam into a fast, mechanical verification. This post is the export checklist: exactly which reports to pull, why each one matters, and how they tie together.

At Don Clarke Enterprises we package and place ABL facilities, and through our affiliate Asset Based Lending Consultants — the global leader in field examinations since 1986 — we have seen both sides of thousands of exams. Donald Clarke was inducted into the SFNet Hall of Fame in 2021, authored Asset Based Lending Disciplines, the first textbook on the discipline, and has trained more than 5,000 lending professionals, including many of the examiners who will walk through your door. The list below is the one that consistently separates a clean exam from a slow one.

What the Examiner Is Actually Doing With Your Exports

Before the report list, it helps to understand the examiner's job, because it explains why the reports have to reconcile rather than just exist. A field examiner is independently verifying that the collateral behind your borrowing base is real, eligible, and worth what you say it is. To do that they run a handful of tests: they confirm the AR aging total ties to the general ledger and to the borrowing base certificate; they calculate dilution from your actual credit memos and cash application; they sample invoices and trace them to shipping and payment; they verify inventory exists and is valued correctly; and they confirm cutoff — that sales and cash landed in the right period. Every report you prepare maps to one of those tests. If your exports do not tie to each other, the examiner cannot rely on them, and unreliable data is resolved the only way a lender can resolve it: conservatively. The mechanics of the exam itself are covered in our field examinations guide and the step-by-step prep cadence in our first field exam playbook; this post is specifically about the data room you hand them.

A Note on "Field Exam Software"

Borrowers searching for "ABL field exam software" are usually looking for one of two things: the tools examiners use, or a way to make their own systems produce exam-ready output. You do not need to buy anything. Examiners bring their own workpaper tools; what they need from you is clean exports from the systems you already run. The practical goal is to know your own software well enough to produce the standard reports below — as Excel or CSV exports wherever possible, because examiners work in spreadsheets and a PDF they cannot manipulate slows them down. If your ERP can schedule or save these as report templates, build them once and reuse them every exam and every borrowing base cycle.

The Accounts Receivable Export Package

AR is the heart of most borrowing bases and the bulk of the exam. These are the reports to have ready, each as a data export tied to a common as-of date:

• Detailed AR aging — by customer and by invoice, in standard buckets (current, 1–30, 31–60, 61–90, 90+), as of the exam cutoff date. This is the master document the entire AR test builds on. The total must tie to the AR control account in the general ledger.
• Sales journal / sales register — the detailed list of invoices generated over the lookback period (typically the trailing 12 months), used to test sales trends, cutoff, and the population the examiner samples from.
• Cash receipts journal — all customer payments applied over the lookback period. The examiner pairs this with the sales journal to calculate gross dilution and to test how quickly and completely your invoices convert to cash.
• Credit memo and adjustment report — every credit, rebate, allowance, and write-off issued over the lookback period. This is the single most scrutinized AR report because credit memos are the largest input to your dilution rate.
• Dilution calculation — your own roll-up of credits and adjustments as a percentage of gross sales. You will get a better outcome if you calculate it yourself and hand it over rather than letting the examiner discover it. The way dilution feeds the reserve stack and the advance rate is detailed in our advance rates guide and our reserves guide.
• Customer master / address file — used to identify affiliates, intercompany accounts, foreign customers, and government accounts that drive ineligibility, and to spot duplicate or related debtors behind concentration.
• Ineligibles and cross-aging support — your tagging of past-due, cross-aged, concentration, contra, foreign, and affiliate receivables. Pre-tagging these saves enormous exam time; the compounding math is walked through in our ineligible calculations and cross-aging guide and the categories in our eligible vs. ineligible receivables guide.

The Inventory Export Package

If inventory is in your borrowing base, the examiner verifies that it exists, is valued correctly, and is sufficiently liquid. The exports:

• Perpetual inventory report — by SKU or item, with quantity on hand, unit cost, and extended value as of the cutoff date. The total must tie to the inventory account in the general ledger.
• Inventory aging / slow-moving report — how long stock has been on hand, used to identify obsolete and slow-moving inventory that gets reserved or excluded.
• Inventory by location — where the goods physically sit, including third-party warehouses and consignment, which drive landlord and bailee considerations and the locations the examiner may want to observe.
• Inventory category split — raw materials, work-in-process, and finished goods separated, since lenders advance against each at different rates and WIP is often excluded.
• Recent purchase orders and receiving records — to test inventory cutoff and confirm that recent receipts are valued and recorded correctly.
• Cycle count or physical count records — your most recent counts and the book-to-physical variance, which the examiner compares against to gauge how trustworthy your perpetual records are.

The Reconciliation and Financial Export Package

This is the connective tissue — the reports that prove the AR and inventory exports tie back to your books and to what you have been reporting to the lender:

• General ledger detail and trial balance — for the cutoff date, so AR and inventory subledgers can be tied to their control accounts. A subledger that does not tie to the GL is the most common reason an exam stalls.
• Reconciliations — AR aging to GL, inventory perpetual to GL, and bank reconciliations. Having these prepared and current is the clearest signal to an examiner that your reporting is reliable.
• Recent borrowing base certificates — the last several BBCs submitted to the lender, which the examiner reconciles back to the underlying aging and inventory detail to confirm you have been reporting accurately. If you are unsure how a BBC is built, our line-by-line BBC walkthrough covers it.
• Interim and year-end financial statements — the income statement and balance sheet for the exam period, to frame the collateral within the company's overall performance.
• Accounts payable aging — to identify contra accounts (customers who are also vendors) and any priority payables — rent, taxes, wages — that may drive reserves ahead of the lender.
• Bank statements and lockbox reports — to corroborate the cash-receipts journal and confirm collections are flowing through the agreed cash-management path. How that cash path operates day to day is covered in our cash dominion guide.

The Sample Transaction Package

The examiner will sample a set of invoices and trace each one end to end to confirm the receivable is real and the sale actually happened. You can dramatically speed this up by being ready to pull, for any sampled invoice, a complete support package:

• The invoice itself.
• The customer purchase order authorizing the sale.
• The shipping document or proof of delivery (bill of lading, packing slip, signed POD) confirming goods left and arrived.
• For services or milestone billing, the acceptance or sign-off evidence confirming the work was delivered and accepted.
• The cash application showing the payment, if the invoice has since been paid.

Knowing how to retrieve this chain quickly — whether the documents live in your ERP, a document-management system, or physical files — is the difference between the examiner clearing the sample in an hour and waiting a day for you to find paperwork.

The Field Exam Data Room Checklist

Use this as a pre-exam pull list. Assemble every export as of a single cutoff date, label each clearly, and stage them in one organized folder — physical or digital — before the examiner arrives. The "Test it supports" column tells you which exam procedure each report feeds, so you understand why it matters.

Report / export	Source system	Test it supports
Detailed AR aging (by customer & invoice)	AR / ERP	Existence, eligibility, tie to GL and BBC
Sales journal / register (trailing 12 mo.)	AR / ERP	Sales trend, cutoff, sampling population
Cash receipts journal (trailing 12 mo.)	AR / ERP	Dilution calculation, collection speed
Credit memo & adjustment report	AR / ERP	Dilution — most-scrutinized AR input
Dilution calculation (self-prepared)	Spreadsheet	Advance rate and dilution reserve
Customer master / address file	AR / ERP	Affiliates, foreign, government, concentration
Ineligibles & cross-aging tagging	Spreadsheet / ERP	Eligibility carve-outs
Perpetual inventory report (by SKU)	Inventory / ERP	Existence, valuation, tie to GL
Inventory aging / slow-moving	Inventory / ERP	Obsolescence reserve, eligibility
Inventory by location	Inventory / ERP	Landlord/bailee, observation sites
Raw / WIP / finished-goods split	Inventory / ERP	Category-level advance rates
Purchase orders & receiving records	Purchasing / ERP	Inventory cutoff
Cycle count / physical count records	Inventory / ERP	Book-to-physical variance
GL detail & trial balance	Accounting / GL	Subledger-to-control-account tie
Reconciliations (AR-GL, inv-GL, bank)	Accounting	Reporting reliability
Recent borrowing base certificates	Treasury / finance	Reported vs. actual collateral
Interim & year-end financials	Accounting	Performance context
AP aging	AP / ERP	Contras, priority payables
Bank statements & lockbox reports	Bank portal	Cash corroboration, cutoff
Sample invoice support packages	ERP / DMS / files	Invoice-to-shipment-to-cash trace

Three Mistakes That Slow Down the Data Room

One: handing over PDFs the examiner cannot work in. A locked PDF aging forces the examiner to re-key or estimate. Export to Excel or CSV wherever the system allows; reserve PDFs for source documents like invoices and shipping records where the format is the point.

Two: pulling reports as of different dates. If the aging is month-end but the inventory report is mid-month and the GL is something else again, nothing ties and the examiner cannot reconcile. Pick one cutoff date and pull everything as of it.

Three: letting the examiner discover dilution and ineligibles for the first time. Surprises read as either weak controls or something hidden, and both push findings conservative. Calculate your own dilution, tag your own ineligibles, and present them. You will rarely beat the examiner's number by hiding it, and you will lose credibility trying. The specific findings that most often cost availability — and how to get ahead of them — are catalogued in our field exam findings guide.

Where the Data Room Fits in the Broader Diligence

The field exam data room is one piece of the full document package a lender works through before and during a facility. The broader set of items a borrower should have ready — corporate, financial, and collateral — is laid out in our ABL due diligence checklist. The exam-specific exports above are the collateral-verification core of that package, and they are the ones most likely to be requested under time pressure, which is exactly why preparing them in advance pays off.

Why DCE

We help borrowers assemble exam-ready data rooms before the examiner arrives — pulling the right exports, reconciling the subledgers to the GL, calculating dilution and tagging ineligibles up front, and pre-empting the adjustments that quietly erode availability. Because our affiliate ABLC has performed field examinations for lenders worldwide since 1986, we know what examiners test and how they read the data, and we prepare borrowers to that standard. Don Clarke has trained the underwriters and examiners at major ABL lenders on this exact discipline, and that perspective is what we bring to every borrower we represent.