Quickly estimate your SMB acquisition’s debt service, equity requirements, and owners’ cash flow.

No spreadsheet (or back of a napkin) required.

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Buying a business is hard. Screening an acquisition shouldn’t be.

When you’re putting your life savings into a business, there are countless questions to answer. Before you figure out the hard questions, though, there are three potential deal-breaker questions to answer:

Based on the business’s earnings and the bank’s requirements for loan to value (LTV) and debt service coverage ratio (DSCR), how much will a bank lend to me for the acquisition?
Looking at the purchase price and subtracting the amount a bank will lend, am I able to fund the required equity injection?
After subtracting debt service from seller’s discretionary earnings (SDE), is the remaining cash flow enough for me to pay myself?

In other words: Does my deal work?

Like all investors, we want to be helpful. So we built a simple calculator.

It’s free, it’s entirely online (no sign-up required), and we made it really easy to use:

In each section below, enter a few assumptions in the yellow boxes with blue text.
Our online calculator uses your inputs and answers the three questions above.
If you want, you can then download the spreadsheet to update offline or send to your advisors.

Now, we (and our very prudent attorneys!) do have a few caveats:

Our calculator is meant to be quick, dirty, and directionally correct. It’s not a replacement for a robust financial model, and, given the simplicity of this tool, we do not represent or warrant that what we calculate will be precisely correct for your deal.
Our calculator is absolutely not a substitute for any sort of due diligence, be it financial, legal, tax-related, or quality of earnings.
Nothing here constitutes financial guidance, legal counsel, or any other sort of advice. (The lawyers want to include another 8,000 words to this effect, but we all get the point. Right?)