funding-options

---
name: funding-options
description: Turns one sentence about what the money is for into a written match with the finance that actually fits: a purpose statement with an amount and a date, a table of candidate products scored against that purpose, a named list of the products ruled out and why, the regulated or unregulated status of each, a personal guarantee register, and a total cost comparison ready for your accountant. Use when you know you need money and do not yet know which kind of money to ask for.
---

# One page that says what the money is for, which finance fits it, and which products you have ruled out and why

You give this the thing you want to buy or bridge, the amount, the date you need it by, your trading history and your last two sets of accounts. You get back a purpose statement, a table of the finance products that match that purpose, a written list of the ones that do not and the reason each was ruled out, whether each product is regulated credit or not, what security and what personal guarantee each would want, and a total cost comparison you can hand to your accountant. It will not tell you which one to take and it will never say whether you would be approved. No lender publishes an approval rate for a single independent venue, and anyone who quotes you one is guessing.

## What it does

1. **Write the purpose in one sentence with an amount and a date, before naming a single product.** Not "we need funding" but "we need 18,000 pounds by 14 November to replace the combi oven that failed on 2 September". The purpose decides the product, and an owner who starts at the product shops for a loan when the answer was hire purchase on the oven. Write the amount from a quote or an invoice, not from memory, and write the date from the thing that forces it: the lease renewal, the delivery slot, the season. If you cannot write the sentence, you are not ready to apply, and that is a useful thing to discover on a Tuesday rather than in an underwriter's queue.

2. **Sort the purpose into one of four kinds, because each kind has a different natural product.** One: an asset you will own and use for years, which points at hire purchase or a finance lease. Two: a gap between doing the work and being paid for it, which points at invoice finance or an overdraft. Three: a one off project, a refit, a second site or a piece of capital works, which points at a term loan. Four: trading losses or a shortfall in working capital, which points at nothing good and needs the honest conversation with your accountant first. Write which of the four it is. A business that funds kind four with kind one is buying an oven to pay last month's wages.

3. **Check the Start Up Loan gate before anything commercial, because it is the cheapest money on the list and it closes.** The Start Up Loans programme is for people "starting a new business or have been trading for up to 60 months". It is "a government-backed personal loan available to individuals looking to start or grow a business in the UK", it is "unsecured, so there's no need to put forward any assets or guarantors", the rate is a "Fixed interest rate of 7.5% p.a." over a "1 - 5 year loan repayment term", there are "No application or set-up fees", and successful applicants get "12 months of free mentoring". The ceiling matters for a partnership: all owners or partners can individually apply for up to 25,000 pounds each, with a maximum of 100,000 pounds available per business. Sixty months from your first day of trading is a date. Write it down.

4. **Check whether a Growth Guarantee Scheme facility is in play, and write the one sentence that most owners get wrong.** GGS is "the successor to the Recovery Loan Scheme" and supports "term loans, overdrafts, asset finance, invoice finance and asset-based lending". The British Business Bank states the point plainly: "The scheme provides the lender with a 70% government-backed guarantee against the outstanding balance of the facility after it has completed its normal recovery process. The borrower always remains 100% liable for the debt." The guarantee protects the lender, not you. One protection does run your way: "Principal Private Residences cannot be taken as security within the Scheme." Record both sentences in the file in the owner's own words, because the belief that the government will pay if the business cannot is the single most expensive misunderstanding in small business lending.

5. **Record, for every candidate product, whether it is regulated credit or not, because the answer changes what happens when it goes wrong.** A credit agreement is exempt where "the lender provides the borrower with credit exceeding 25,000 pounds" and "the agreement is entered into by the borrower wholly or predominantly for the purposes of a business carried on, or intended to be carried on, by the borrower". Lending to a limited company sits outside the consumer credit regime entirely, because the borrower is not an individual. A sole trader, or a partnership of two or three people not all of which are companies, borrowing 25,000 pounds or less for the business is generally inside it. Mark each row regulated, exempt or company borrowing, and note that the exemption is triggered by a declaration the borrower signs, so read what you are signing.

6. **Record, for every candidate product, what security and what personal guarantee it would want, and treat that column as the decisive one.** On GGS, "Personal guarantees can be taken at the lender's discretion, in line with their normal commercial lending practices." A personal guarantee is not paperwork. It is a promise that if the company does not pay, you pay, from your own money and your own assets. The Financial Ombudsman Service can help "individuals who act as personal guarantors for loans to businesses they're involved in", which tells you how routine the resulting disputes are. Fill the column honestly for every row and leave the decision blank. Deciding to sign is not this skill's job, and it is not the bookkeeper's job either.

7. **Compare on total cost of credit over the full term, never on the headline rate.** For each candidate, write the amount advanced, the rate and whether it is fixed or variable, the arrangement or documentation fee, any broker fee, any service fee expressed as a percentage of turnover or of each invoice, the early settlement position, and the total of every payment you will make across the term. A facility with a lower rate and a two percent arrangement fee over eighteen months can cost more than a facility with a higher rate and no fee. Put the total pounds in the last column and sort by it. That column is the only fair comparison, and it is the one that is never on the advert.

8. **Write the ruled-out list with a reason beside each product, and keep it.** Merchant cash advances, unsecured short term loans, borrowing on personal credit cards through a director's loan, and anything sold on speed rather than price all belong on a list with a written reason. The list is worth more than the shortlist, because in four months when a broker rings you have already decided and you can say no in one sentence. Name the product, name the reason, date the line.

9. **Hand the sorting, the arithmetic and the file building to Codex, and keep the judgement here.** Write the inputs into a working folder, then run:

   ```
   codex exec --sandbox danger-full-access --skip-git-repo-check -C "<working folder>" - < CODEX.md
   ```

   Claude hands over the purpose statement, the four way classification, the candidate product list with each product's rate, fee, term and security terms exactly as the owner recorded them from a quote, the trading start date, the entity type and the amounts. Codex returns the options table, the ruled-out register, the regulated status column, the personal guarantee register, the total cost column sorted ascending, and a gaps file listing every figure that arrived without a document behind it. Codex decides nothing.

10. **Produce the one page for the accountant and date it.** Top of the page: the purpose sentence, the amount, the date. Middle: the shortlist sorted by total cost, with the security and personal guarantee columns visible. Bottom: the ruled-out list. Footer: the date each rate and fee was read, and from which quote or web page. An undated funding comparison gets reused in six months against last season's pricing, and the owner ends up choosing a product that no longer exists on those terms.

## Then it checks

1. The file contains one purpose sentence naming a thing, an amount and a date, and the amount is traceable to a quote or an invoice that is named in the file.
2. Every candidate product row states the rate, the fee, the term, the security required and whether a personal guarantee is required, and no cell reads "typical" or "around".
3. Every candidate product row carries a regulated status of exactly regulated, exempt business lending or company borrowing, and the entity type it was assessed against is stated.
4. Where the business has been trading for less than 60 months, the file states the Start Up Loans position and the date on which 60 months from first trading falls.
5. Where any Growth Guarantee Scheme product appears, the file carries the sentence that the borrower remains 100 percent liable for the debt and that the guarantee is given to the lender.
6. The total cost of credit column is complete for every shortlisted row, the rows are sorted by it, and no row is compared on headline rate alone.

Any check fails: name it, redo that step once. Failed twice: say what is wrong and stop.

## Rules
- Public information only.
- Never invent a fact, a number or a quote.
- Anything sent in someone's name says whose name it is.
- Never state a typical approval rate, a typical interest rate offered to an independent venue, a normal debt service cover ratio or an average time to decision. No published figure exists for a single independent UK hospitality business. The numbers that circulate come from brokers who are paid on completion, and an owner who believes one will read a normal decline as a personal failure and a bad offer as a good one.
- Never predict whether an application will be approved, and never say an application is likely to succeed. The credit reference agencies say it of themselves: "we do not tell lenders whether to offer credit to consumers". Neither does this.
- Never decide whether to sign a personal guarantee, and never present one as a formality. A personal guarantee puts the owner's own assets at risk, including savings and potentially a home where a lender is permitted to take one, and the decision to sign is the owner's alone, taken with their own solicitor after reading the actual deed.
- Never present the Growth Guarantee Scheme, or any government backed scheme, as reducing what the borrower owes. The guarantee runs to the lender. Writing it any other way in a file an owner will reread at midnight is the worst thing this skill could do.
- Never compare two products on headline rate. If a total cost figure cannot be built because a fee is unknown, the row stays incomplete and the gap is recorded, rather than the comparison being completed with an assumed fee.
- Never carry a rate or a fee forward from an earlier version of this file. Rates move, schemes change their terms, and a quote has a date on it for a reason.
- This output is a working document prepared for the owner to check against their own quotes and their own accounts, and for their own accountant to review on affordability, tax treatment and the effect on the balance sheet. Where the borrowing is regulated, or where any security is a personal guarantee or a charge over a home, it is also for their own solicitor and an FCA authorised adviser. It is not advice, it is not a recommendation to take any product, and it is not a statement that any product is suitable.

## Built from
- The Start Up Loans Company, "What is a Start Up Loan?", https://www.startuploans.co.uk/what-is-a-start-up-loan, no publication date shown on the page, read 23 September 2026: the 500 to 25,000 pound range, the 7.5 percent fixed rate, the one to five year term, the unsecured position, the 100,000 pound per business cap and the 12 months of mentoring, all in step 3.
- The Start Up Loans Company, "Am I eligible?", https://www.startuploans.co.uk/about-the-loan/am-i-eligible, no publication date shown on the page, read 23 September 2026: the 60 month trading limit and the excluded business types and loan purposes in step 3.
- British Business Bank, "Growth Guarantee Scheme", https://www.british-business-bank.co.uk/finance-options/debt-finance/growth-guarantee-scheme, no publication date shown on the page, read 23 September 2026: the successor status, the product range, the 70 percent guarantee to the lender, the borrower remaining 100 percent liable, the discretionary personal guarantee position and the principal private residence exclusion, in steps 4 and 6.
- The Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (Regulated Activities) Order 2001, article 60C, https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2001/544/article/60C, stated on the page as up to date with all changes known to be in force on or before 23 September 2026, read 23 September 2026: the exemption for business credit exceeding 25,000 pounds and the declaration presumption, in step 5.
- The Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (Regulated Activities) Order 2001, article 60L, https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2001/544/article/60L, stated on the page as up to date with all changes known to be in force on or before 23 September 2026, read 23 September 2026: the definition of a relevant recipient of credit as a partnership of two or three persons not all of whom are bodies corporate, in step 5.
- Financial Ombudsman Service, "Who we can help", https://sme.financial-ombudsman.org.uk/complain/can-help, no publication date shown on the page, read 23 September 2026: that individuals who act as personal guarantors for loans to businesses they are involved in can bring a complaint, in step 6.
- Experian, Equifax and TransUnion, "Credit Reference Agency Information Notice (CRAIN)", version 1.2, https://www.experian.co.uk/legal/crain/, adopted 02 December 2024, read 23 September 2026: the statement that the agencies do not tell lenders whether to offer credit, used in the rule forbidding any prediction of approval.
- Department for Business and Trade, "Finance and support for your business", https://www.gov.uk/business-finance-support, no publication date shown on the page, read 23 September 2026: the filterable scheme finder used to build the candidate list in step 2, showing 127 schemes on the day it was read.

# funding-options

## You are given
One UK hospitality business looking for money. The purpose statement the owner wrote, verbatim, naming the thing the money is for, the amount in pounds and the date it is needed by, together with the name and date of the quote or invoice the amount came from. The owner's classification of that purpose as exactly one of asset purchase, payment gap, project or capital works, or working capital. The legal form of the business, stated as sole trader, partnership, limited liability partnership or limited company, and for a partnership the number of partners and how many of them are bodies corporate. The date the business first traded. The last two sets of filed or draft accounts and the current management accounts, as files. The candidate product list the owner built, and for each product: the lender name, the product name, the amount available, the rate and whether it is fixed or variable, every fee with its basis, the term in months, the security the lender has said it requires, whether a personal guarantee is required, the early settlement terms, and the date and source of each figure. The owner's ruled-out list with a written reason beside each entry. All judgement calls, including which products are candidates, which are ruled out, how the purpose is classified and whether any guarantee will be signed, have already been made by the owner and are supplied to you.

## Produce
Write into a `./funding-options-output/` folder:

1. `purpose.md` recording, on separate lines and nothing else: the purpose sentence verbatim; the amount in pounds; the date needed by; the source document name and its date; the classification, which must be exactly one of `asset purchase`, `payment gap`, `project or capital works`, `working capital`; the legal form; the first trading date; and the date 60 months after the first trading date. Every line names where the figure came from.
2. `options.csv` with these columns in this order: `option_ref`, `lender_name_verbatim`, `product_name_verbatim`, `product_type`, `amount_available_gbp`, `rate_percent`, `rate_basis`, `term_months`, `fee_name`, `fee_amount_gbp`, `fee_basis`, `security_required_verbatim`, `personal_guarantee_required`, `regulated_status`, `total_payments_gbp`, `total_cost_of_credit_gbp`, `figure_source`, `figure_date`, `complete`. `option_ref` is F001 upward. `product_type` is exactly one of `term loan`, `overdraft`, `hire purchase`, `finance lease`, `operating lease`, `invoice factoring`, `invoice discounting`, `asset refinance`, `start up loan`, `grant`, `equity`, `other`. `rate_basis` is exactly one of `fixed`, `variable`, `not stated`. `fee_basis` is exactly one of `one off`, `per annum`, `percentage of advance`, `percentage of turnover`, `percentage of each invoice`, `not stated`. `personal_guarantee_required` is exactly one of `yes`, `no`, `at lender discretion`, `not stated`. `regulated_status` is exactly one of `regulated`, `exempt business lending`, `company borrowing`, `not credit`. `complete` is `yes` only where `total_cost_of_credit_gbp` is calculated from supplied figures with no gap.
3. `total-cost.csv` with columns: `option_ref`, `amount_advanced_gbp`, `sum_of_all_fees_gbp`, `sum_of_all_interest_gbp`, `total_payments_gbp`, `total_cost_of_credit_gbp`, `cost_per_1000_borrowed_gbp`, `rank`. Sorted ascending by `total_cost_of_credit_gbp`. Rows that are not `complete` in `options.csv` are placed at the end with `rank` left empty and are listed in `gaps.md`.
4. `guarantee-register.csv` with columns: `option_ref`, `lender_name_verbatim`, `guarantee_required`, `guarantee_wording_verbatim`, `guarantor_named`, `capped_or_unlimited`, `cap_amount_gbp`, `home_offered_as_security`, `deed_supplied`, `solicitor_review_recorded`. `capped_or_unlimited` is exactly one of `capped`, `unlimited`, `not stated`. `home_offered_as_security` and `deed_supplied` and `solicitor_review_recorded` are `yes`, `no` or `not stated`. No cell in this file is ever completed by inference.
5. `regulated-status.md` stating, for each `option_ref`, the amount of credit, the legal form of the borrower, whether the credit exceeds 25,000 pounds, and the resulting status, each line naming the supplied figure it rests on. It states the statutory test being applied in one sentence and does not interpret beyond it.
6. `ruled-out.csv` with columns: `product_name_verbatim`, `lender_name_verbatim`, `reason_verbatim`, `date_ruled_out`, `who_ruled_it_out`. Every reason is copied exactly as the owner wrote it.
7. `scheme-facts.md` recording the Start Up Loans position and the Growth Guarantee Scheme position as supplied, each as a short verbatim block with its source URL and the date it was read. It must carry, word for word, the supplied sentence that the borrower always remains 100 percent liable for the debt wherever a Growth Guarantee Scheme product appears in `options.csv`.
8. `gaps.md` a numbered list of: every option row missing a rate, a fee, a term or a security statement; every figure supplied without a source document name and date; every guarantee row reading `not stated`; every option whose total cost could not be completed and the exact figure that was missing; any product on the candidate list with no lender named; and any supplied text containing an em dash character.

## Rules
- Codex sorts, totals, ranks and records. It never chooses a product, never rules one in or out, never classifies a purpose, never decides a regulated status beyond applying the supplied numeric test, and never fills a guarantee cell from context.
- Never estimate a rate, a fee or a total. A missing figure leaves the cell empty, marks the row `complete` as `no`, and produces a line in `gaps.md`. A part costed option is never ranked.
- Never write a benchmark figure of any kind into any file: no typical rate, no typical approval rate, no average time to decision, no normal debt service ratio. None exists for a single independent UK hospitality business and none is to be recorded.
- Never write any statement, in any file, about whether an application would be approved, is likely to be approved, or looks strong. That judgement belongs to a lender and to nobody else.
- Never describe a government guarantee as protecting the borrower, and never soften the liability sentence. Where the supplied wording says the borrower remains 100 percent liable, it is copied exactly.
- Never record a personal guarantee decision, never mark a guarantee as acceptable or standard, and never leave a guarantee row blank where the option requires one. Unknown is `not stated` and goes in `gaps.md`.
- Never carry a rate, fee or term forward from a previous version of any file. Only figures supplied with a source name and date in this run are used.
- Use British English, GBP written as `GBP` or the word pounds, and DD Month YYYY dates. No em dash characters in any file you write, and any supplied text containing one is recorded verbatim and flagged in `gaps.md`.
- Every quoted lender name, product name, security wording and reason is copied exactly, including its punctuation and capitalisation.
- Every file ends with this line: this is a working document prepared for the owner to check against their own quotes and accounts, and for their own accountant, and for their own solicitor and an FCA authorised adviser where the borrowing is regulated or any security is a personal guarantee or a charge over a home. It is not advice and it is not a recommendation to take any product.

## Return
The absolute path of every file written, the row count of each CSV, the purpose sentence verbatim with its amount and date, the count of complete and incomplete option rows, the ranked list of complete options by total cost of credit with the pounds figure for each, the cheapest and the dearest total cost of credit figures and the gap between them in pounds, the count of options requiring a personal guarantee and the count reading `at lender discretion` or `not stated`, the regulated status counts by category, confirmation in one line that the 100 percent liability sentence appears in `scheme-facts.md` where a Growth Guarantee Scheme product is present or that no such product is present, the number of entries in `ruled-out.csv`, and the `gaps.md` item count.