You need to enable JavaScript to run this app.
By Travis Yule — CEO & Founder, Full Send Funding
Published 2025-04-25 · Updated 2026-09-30
A soft pull is invisible to other lenders and does not move your score. The real cost of hard inquiries is the pattern they create, not the points they take.
In one sentence: Applying here uses a soft credit pull only, which is visible to nobody but you; the real cost of hard inquiries is the story a cluster tells the next underwriter, and a funder sees only the hard ones, so the inquiry list it reads is a floor rather than a count.
Applying for funding here does not hurt your credit score. The application uses a soft credit pull only, which is visible to you and to nobody else, and has no effect on your score.
That is the short answer to the first question almost every owner asks. The longer answer — what the two kinds of inquiry actually are, what arrives on an underwriter's screen when a report comes back, how much a hard pull really costs, and how to shop for funding without damaging your file — is worth having, because the fear of inquiries causes more expensive mistakes than the inquiries themselves.
A soft inquiry is a credit check that does not require your application for new credit in the reporting sense. Pre-qualification checks, account reviews by existing creditors, employment screening and checking your own report are all soft. They appear on the copy of the report you pull yourself, they are invisible to other lenders, and they do not affect the score.[1]
A hard inquiry is recorded when you formally apply for credit and a lender pulls your file to decide, and it can affect the score because scoring models look at how recently and how often you have applied.[1] It is visible to other lenders for two years and factors into the score for one. Either kind can be made only for a purpose the Fair Credit Reporting Act permits, a credit transaction you are party to among them.[2] The typical effect of a single hard pull is small — commonly a few points, and less for a thick, well-established file — and it fades.
The mistake is not in the size of the effect. It is in the pattern: half a dozen hard inquiries across a month, from different lenders, tells the next underwriter that several others looked and something happened. That signal costs far more than the points do.
An inquiry is a request to a bureau for a report about a person, matched on identifying details — legal name, date of birth, current address, Social Security number. Nothing in it is addressed to the company. That is the point at which owners reasonably ask why a business with its own EIN needs somebody's SSN, and the honest answer is that the number is doing three separate jobs, only one of which is the score.
It matches the applicant to the right file. That matters more than it sounds: common names produce mixed files, and a mixed file is a stranger's delinquency sitting on your report under your name. It identifies the owner who signs the personal guarantee, which is what makes a business obligation reach a person at all — the guarantee, not the score, is where personal exposure actually lives. And it is the only way anything attached to a person rather than to the company surfaces at all: an open bankruptcy, an active judgment, a tax lien. Four months of bank statements will not show any of those.
A consumer report — the file a bureau returns on a person — is not a score with some notes attached. What arrives is: identifying information; a list of tradelines, each with an open date, a limit or original amount, a current balance and a month-by-month payment history; collections; public-record items; and a list of everyone who has made an inquiry, with dates. The score is a number a model computes on top of all of that, and a funder generally sees both the number and the material underneath it.
In a revenue-based funding file, two parts of that file get read hard, and the score is not one of them.
We pre-qualify with a soft pull, and it is the only pull we run: no hard inquiry is placed to see what you qualify for, none is placed at funding, and checking your options leaves no mark whatever the answer is.
That is possible because the decision does not lean on the score in the first place. The statements carry it, which is an architecture rather than a courtesy — a funder that underwrites on the credit file will hard-pull at some point, and one that underwrites on deposits has no reason to.
We also use "pre-qualified" rather than "pre-approved" deliberately. They are not synonyms: a pre-qualification is an indication based on what has been seen so far, and an approval follows underwriting. Any funder using the two interchangeably is being loose with a distinction that has a legal meaning.
An underwriter who already has four months of bank statements open is not reading the credit report for a verdict. The statements have already done the sizing. The report is being read for context, and for three things in particular.
The inquiry list, by name and date. The names of the lenders who pulled are on the report, and the people reading them do this all day: a funder recognises other funders, banks, equipment lessors and card processors on sight. Five recognisable funding names in eleven days is a story, and an experienced underwriter reads that story before reading the score. It usually means one of two things. Either the file has been shopped hard and nobody has funded it, which raises the obvious question of what the others saw that we have not found yet — or somebody has funded it in the last two weeks and the money has not yet appeared in the statements, which makes the deal in front of us materially different from the one described on the application. A freshly funded position is one of the reasons a good file gets declined, and the inquiry list is often where it shows up first.
Here is the part that is genuinely asymmetric, and it cuts both ways. A funder sees only the hard inquiries. Soft inquiries are shown to you and to nobody else, so every funder that pre-qualifies on a soft pull — us among them — leaves nothing on that list. The inquiry list is a partial map of who you have talked to: it shows the lenders who made you pay for the conversation and hides the ones who did not. So when an underwriter counts five hard inquiries, the real number of funders holding your file is usually higher than five, and everyone in the room knows it. That is why the count is read as a floor rather than a total.
Public-record and derogatory items, with their dates. What is being read here is recency, not history. An item from four years ago that has been resolved describes a business that has since survived it. A judgment entered last month describes the environment the remittance is about to be paid in. The distinction the file turns on is whether the obligation is closed, not whether it ever existed. The way credit is weighed against everything else in the decision is set out in full in the underwriting walkthrough.
The tradelines as a second view of your obligations. This is the cross-check almost nobody expects, and it is the reason the report earns its place in a revenue file at all. Every recurring debit in the bank statements ought to have an explanation, and every reported obligation ought to be paid from somewhere. A debit with no matching tradeline is usually a funding position, because most advance providers do not report payment history to the consumer bureaus. A tradeline carrying a real balance that never appears as a debit in the operating account is being paid from another account, a second business, or a personal one — none of which is a problem, all of which is a question, and any of which changes what the deposits in front of us actually represent.
What the underwriter does with all three is usually not what applicants brace for. In most files the answer is a question, a stipulation, or a smaller number — not a decline.
The chronology is compressed — the statements and the report land within minutes of each other — but the order of weight is fixed, and knowing it is what stops people optimising the wrong thing.
The question worth asking any funder at step 3 is whether the pre-qualification pull is the only pull. At some shops a soft pull opens the conversation and a hard pull runs at closing, once you are committed and least likely to walk. Asking costs nothing, and the answer tells you something about the shop either way.
Put the two costs side by side, because almost nobody does.
The score cost of a single hard inquiry is a few points on a thick file, fading over the following year. There is no way to turn that into dollars honestly, and anyone who offers you a precise figure is guessing.
The cost of the pattern can be put in dollars, and it is not small. Take a $50,000 advance. Priced at a 1.22 factor it costs $11,000 — that is $50,000 × 1.22 = $61,000 back, less the $50,000 you received — which is 22% of the amount funded. Priced at 1.32 the same $50,000 costs $16,000, because $50,000 × 1.32 = $66,000. Both sit inside the published range: cost of capital here runs from 4.5% to 45%, and it is a total cost on the amount funded rather than an annual rate, so a 1.22 factor is 22% and a 1.32 factor is 32%. (Converting either one into an annual rate is a separate exercise with its own traps.) The gap between those two prices is $5,000 on one deal.
Spread across a twelve-month term paid on banking days — call it 21 a month, so 252 debits — the cheaper deal is about $242 a day and the dearer one about $262, a difference of roughly $20 every banking day for a year. Against the $60,000-a-month depositor from step 4 — about $2,857 across a 21-day month — those debits are 8.5% and 9.2% of daily deposits, light, fundable shares by the measure that most often declines a file. Whether that comes out daily or weekly is a cash-flow question rather than a pricing one.
Now put the two next to each other. A few points, invisible to you in practice, against $5,000 and $20 a day. Price moves with what an underwriter believes about the risk, and a file that looks shopped, stacked or urgent gets priced at the top of the band it qualifies for. The inquiries are not what cost you the $5,000 — the story they tell is.
And there is a third number, the one people forget: the cost of doing nothing. Suppose the $50,000 buys materials for a job that pays $72,000 — a gross margin of $22,000, stated as an input rather than a benchmark. At the cheaper price the capital costs $11,000 and the job still clears $11,000; at the dearer price it costs $16,000 and clears $6,000. Waiting a month so a few inquiries can age clears nothing at all, because the job goes to whoever could buy materials this month. That is the comparison worth running — the margin on the use of the money against the cost of the money, never the margin against a handful of points.
Nobody reads this article to learn taxonomy. The decision is whether to let somebody look at your file today. Five cases where the obvious answer is wrong:
Wrong when the hard pull is for the facility you actually intend to close. A bank line of credit, an SBA loan or an equipment lease will usually cost you an inquiry, and each of those is cheaper on the rate than revenue-based funding. Whether it is cheaper in total is a different question — on a job that will not wait, the ninety-day loan can be the expensive option — but where the cheaper facility is genuinely available in time, spending one hard inquiry to close it is an obviously good trade. The rule is not "never" — it is that a hard inquiry should be the last step on a deal you have already decided to take, not the first step in finding out whether a deal exists. That is what soft-pull pre-qualification is for.
Wrong, and this is the expensive one, because the damage happens somewhere you are not looking. Applying widely does not show up in your inquiry list when the funders soft-pull — but it does show up in your bank statements as multiple funding deposits, in the stipulation questions you will be asked, and in the simple fact that a file sent widely tends to reach the same desk twice. Taking a second position on top of a first is the mechanism that does the most damage in this industry, and it usually starts as a harmless-looking pile of applications nobody meant to convert.
Usually wrong here, and for a specific reason: you are optimising the input that carries the least weight. A month of waiting does not change your average daily balance, your deposit consistency or your existing positions, and those are what set the offer. If the inquiries are recent because five funders looked at you last week, waiting does help — not because the score recovers but because the story goes stale. If they are eight months old, waiting is just delay with a cost attached.
Wrong often enough that it is worth saying plainly. The report does not set a pass/fail threshold here. What ends conversations is capacity — debt service already too high, a balance that cannot carry the debit, deposits too uneven to size — and eligibility bright lines like an open bankruptcy. The reasons applications are actually declined are enumerated in detail, and "low score" does not appear among them as a standalone reason.
Wrong, and it is the single most common way an owner's file gets shopped without their knowledge. A broker with one signed application can submit it to a dozen funders in an afternoon. If any of those funders hard-pull, the inquiries are yours. Ask, before you sign anything: how many funders will my file be sent to, which ones, and do any of them hard-pull? A broker who will answer that in writing is worth working with.
Worth stating, because the limits are what put the report in its place.
It is a record of a person, not of a business. Nothing on it shows what is in the operating account this morning, which is the number a remittance is actually paid out of.
It is reported on a cycle, so it is always a little stale. Each creditor reports on its own schedule, so balances are accurate as of somebody's last report date rather than as of today. A file that was paid down three weeks ago may still read as maxed out. Bank statements do not have that lag.
Most existing funding positions are not on it. Advance providers largely do not report payment history to the consumer bureaus, so the obligation most likely to sink a new advance — another funder's daily debit — is invisible on the credit file and plainly visible in the statements. That asymmetry is the single best argument for why revenue-based underwriting reads statements first.
It says nothing about the business's customers. Concentration, payment terms, a receivable ninety days out: none of it appears. On a contractor or a staffing file, that is most of the risk.
Business credit files sit with different bureaus, on different scales, and are inquired against separately from your personal file. A commercial inquiry does not touch your consumer score.
The two are related mainly through the personal guarantee, which nearly all small-business credit carries regardless of how strong the business file is. Building the business file is a deliberate, twelve-month exercise, and it is worth starting early precisely because it takes that long.
There is a second half to this that the question "does applying hurt my credit?" usually misses: what happens to your credit after you are funded. Full Send Funding does not report this funding to the commercial bureaus by default, so repaying it does not build a business credit file on its own. Reporting is available on request rather than automatically — if you want the tradeline, ask before funding and we will tell you what we can report. The relationship is one-way unless you ask for it to be otherwise: no mark going in, and no tradeline coming out.
Frequently, yes. Revenue-based funding was built for the case where the score is a poor description of the business, and the score is one input rather than the decision. What is being asked is whether the cash flow supports the remittance.
What does weigh more heavily are open items rather than old ones: an unresolved default, an open bankruptcy, an active judgment. A settled or paid-off previous default does not disqualify a business — an open, unresolved one is a different matter, because an unfinished process still has a claim on the money. All credit profiles may apply, all industries are served, and non-profits are funded on the standard bar. The qualification questions are answered in full here.
For revenue-based funding, the honest ranking of what decides a file is not close. In descending order of weight:
This is why, on deals up to $2 million, 90% of complete applications that meet our requirements are approved, and why "my credit is rough" is very rarely the end of the conversation. It is also why fear of a two-point score movement should not stop you from getting a real answer.
Three honest limits, and who can answer each.
Exactly how many points a hard inquiry will cost you. That depends on which model the next lender runs, how thick your file is and what else is on it. Nobody outside the bureau and the model vendor can give you a real number, and a funder who quotes one is inventing it.
What is on your file right now. We do not have it until you apply and consent, and we cannot look it up for you beforehand. Pull it yourself — that pull is soft.
Whether a report on you was pulled without a permissible purpose. If you find an inquiry from a company you never applied to, the dispute runs through the bureau that furnished the report and, if it goes further than that, through a consumer-protection attorney. That is a legal question rather than an underwriting one, and this article is information rather than legal advice.
What we can tell you is what happens on our side of it, which is the whole of the policy: a soft credit pull only, no mark, and a decision that turns on the bank account.
Checking what you qualify for costs nothing, marks nothing and commits to nothing. Four months in business, $10,000 a month in revenue, a decision within 24 business hours, and a soft pull only.
Check your options, or read how much a business at your revenue can expect first.
The distinction between the two kinds of inquiry — and that a soft inquiry does not affect a score and is shown only to the consumer — is stated from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's guidance cited; the size of a hard inquiry's effect and its visibility period are that guidance's general description, not a measurement of any scoring model. The ranking of what matters more than inquiries is the firm's own underwriting practice, and the approval rate — 90% of complete applications that meet the firm's requirements, on deals up to $2 million — is the firm's own figure.
Not with us — our application uses a soft credit pull only, which is visible to you alone and has no effect on your score. Elsewhere it depends on the funder, which makes "is this a soft or a hard pull?" a fair question to ask before you apply, and a direct answer a small test of the funder.
A soft inquiry is a credit check that does not accompany a formal application for new credit — pre-qualification, account reviews by existing creditors, employment screening, checking your own report. It appears only on the copy you pull yourself and is not scored. A hard inquiry is recorded when you formally apply and a lender pulls your file to decide; it is visible to other lenders for two years and factors into the score for about one.
Usually a few points, and less on a thick, established file, fading over the following year. The real cost is not the points — it is the pattern. Half a dozen hard inquiries across a month, from different lenders, tells the next underwriter that several others looked and something happened. That signal is worth far more than the score movement.
Applying at several funders in a short window is treated more leniently by scoring models than the same inquiries spread across months, so if hard pulls are unavoidable, compress them. What genuinely damages you is applying everywhere at once as a strategy — including when a broker submits your file to a dozen funders on your behalf. Ask how many funders your file will be sent to before you sign anything.
Yes. Business credit files sit with different bureaus on different scales and are inquired against separately, so a commercial inquiry does not touch your consumer score. The two are connected mainly through the personal guarantee, which nearly all small-business credit carries regardless of how strong the business file is.
For revenue-based funding, almost everything. In descending order of weight: average daily balance, deposit consistency, negative days, existing positions and the debt service they represent, and revenue trend — with the credit score some distance below all of that. It is why, on deals up to $2 million, 90% of complete applications that meet our requirements are approved, and why "my credit is rough" is rarely the end of the conversation.
Frequently. Revenue-based funding exists for exactly the case where the score is a poor description of the business, and the question being asked is whether cash flow supports the remittance. What weighs more heavily are open items rather than old ones — an unresolved default, an open bankruptcy, an active judgment. A settled or paid-off previous default does not disqualify a business.
They are not synonyms. A pre-qualification is an indication based on what has been seen so far; an approval follows underwriting and a full review. We use "pre-qualified" deliberately, because the distinction carries legal meaning under the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, and a funder that uses the two interchangeably is being loose with something that matters.
Because a credit report is a record of a person and is matched on personal identifiers — legal name, date of birth, address and Social Security number. The number is doing three jobs, and only one of them is the score. It matches you to the right file, which matters because common names produce mixed files. It identifies the owner who signs the personal guarantee. And it is the only way items attached to a person rather than a company — an open bankruptcy, an active judgment, a tax lien — surface at all, since four months of bank statements will not show any of them.
Only partly, and the asymmetry matters. A funder sees the hard inquiries on your report, with the inquiring lender's name and the date, and experienced underwriters recognise other funders on sight. Soft inquiries are shown to you and to nobody else, so every funder that pre-qualifies on a soft pull leaves nothing on that list. The inquiry list is therefore a floor, not a count: when an underwriter sees five hard inquiries, the real number of funders holding your file is usually higher.
The whole file, not just the number: identifying information, tradelines with open dates, limits, balances and month-by-month payment history, collections, public records, and every inquiry with its date. In a revenue-based file an underwriter reads three parts of it — the inquiry list, the dates on any derogatory items, and the tradelines as a cross-check against the debits in the bank statements. A recurring debit with no matching tradeline is usually another funder's position.
Yes, when it is the last step on a facility you have already decided to take rather than the first step in finding out whether one exists. A bank line, an SBA loan or an equipment lease will usually cost an inquiry and each is cheaper on the rate than revenue-based funding, so where one is available in the time you have, spending an inquiry to close it is a good trade. Whether it is cheaper in total depends on what the delay costs. What is not worth it is a hard pull for an exploratory conversation, which is exactly what soft-pull pre-qualification exists to replace.
Not while the freeze is in place: a freeze can stop a soft check from going through. If your credit file is frozen, we ask you to lift the freeze temporarily for the check, and you can put it back once the check is done. It is still a soft pull, so it has no effect on your credit score, and Full Send Funding does not run a hard credit inquiry at any stage.
Travis Yule worked in business funding before starting Full Send Funding in 2021, and has more than five years in business funding in all. He leads the company from Middle Grove, New York, and writes about working capital from the underwriting side of the table — what the numbers actually have to say before a business gets funded.