The Smart System · Tool 03
Is the offer in front of me any good?
Know it in advance — before you sign it. Put in the offer exactly as it was given to you, add whatever fees you have been told about, and see what it works out to a year all-in and where that sits against published ranges.
Learn what changes the risk in each product before you compare offers →
Free. No lender is named and nothing is sent anywhere. Private. It all runs in your browser.
Objective information or arithmetic based on what you enter.
Publicly available information about how commercial lending products and structures commonly work.
Our educational CAS interpretation. It helps you ask better questions; it is not a lender decision or product recommendation.
What kind of finance is it?
This decides whether a comparison range means anything. Some products have a published middle you can be measured against; most do not, and pretending otherwise is worse than saying so.
The offer
Enter it the way it was written down for you. If something is not mentioned in your offer, leave it at zero — and then go and ask about it.
The facility amount, before any fees come out.
The fees — this is where offers stop being comparable
Almost nobody asks this. It changes the answer.
What is moving your price
A rate is never quoted in a vacuum. These are what decide where in a lender’s range you land, and between them they explain most of the gap between the best price in the market and the one in front of you. Tick whatever applies — it changes nothing in the arithmetic, and it is the first thing anyone reviewing this would ask.
Terms that can matter more than the rate
Tick anything you can see in the offer. These do not change the arithmetic unless you enter a fee, but they change the risk of signing.
The tool can calculate and highlight questions; it cannot recommend that you sign, reject or replace the offer. If you ask, Smart Advance can introduce you to a broker archetype that works with this kind of commercial finance so the actual contract and alternatives can be discussed.
Free, and you are never invoiced. If finance settles, the broker pays us out of their own commission. Smart Advance may receive a referral payment if finance later settles through a broker we introduce. You are not invoiced by Smart Advance for the introduction.
Why there is no comparison rate to help you
The National Credit Code does not apply to business-purpose credit at all, so there is no statutory comparison rate on a business loan the way there is on a home loan. That is why two offers can look similar and cost thousands of dollars apart.
If your lender is a signatory to the AFIA Online Small Business Lender Code of Practice, they do have to give you a standardised pricing summary showing an annual percentage rate and a total repayment. Ask for it by name. If they are not a signatory, or they will not produce it, this calculator does the arithmetic instead.
Comparing two structures rather than checking one? Tool 02 does that →