Cash flow statements are key to understanding how a business generates and uses cash. They summarize operating, investing, and financing activities to reveal true liquidity and repayment capacity.
For MCA brokers and funders, accurate analysis of these statements is essential to determine if a merchant can sustain advance repayments. But manual review (checking for missing pages, validating totals, or identifying anomalies) is slow and inconsistent.
Heron automates the scrubbing of cash flow statements by reading, checking, and structuring data directly from submitted documents. The system validates completeness, verifies calculations, flags unusual activity, and organizes results into clean, structured fields.
Instead of spending hours reviewing PDFs, underwriters receive decision-ready insights in seconds.
Automating scrubbing ensures every cash flow statement is accurate, complete, and consistent, reducing turnaround times while improving risk assessment quality.
Use Cases
- Check completeness of statements: Heron confirms all pages and date ranges are present before underwriting begins.
- Validate key calculations: The system verifies that operating, investing, and financing totals add up correctly.
- Detect negative balances or gaps: Heron identifies negative net cash flow trends that could affect funding eligibility.
- Normalize line items: Different formatting or labels from various brokers are standardized into common categories.
- Flag anomalies: Irregular inflows, missing sections, or abnormal ratios trigger review flags.
- Prepare structured outputs: The scrubbed data is pushed into CRM fields for easy review and reporting.
These use cases streamline the validation process, making it faster, more reliable, and less dependent on manual verification.
Operational Impact
Automated scrubbing provides both speed and confidence in the data that underpins every funding decision.
- Speed: Processing time for each statement drops from minutes to seconds.
- Accuracy: Heron’s validation algorithms reduce human errors and miscalculations.
- Scalability: Teams handle large submission volumes without additional headcount.
- Visibility: Every check and flag is logged for audit and analysis.
- Decision quality: Cleaner financial data leads to more consistent underwriting outcomes.
These outcomes directly improve throughput, accuracy, and operational control across lending pipelines.
Scrubbing Logic and Data Checks
Heron’s scrubbing process combines rule-based and AI-driven validation to guarantee completeness and correctness.
- Document validation: Checks if the document type is correctly identified as a cash flow statement.
- Section completeness: Confirms the presence of all major sections, such as operating, investing, and financing.
- Calculation accuracy: Cross-verifies totals and subtotals for arithmetic correctness.
- Trend detection: Reviews net cash movement across reporting periods to spot anomalies or volatility.
- Fraud detection: Flags signs of tampering, duplication, or inconsistent fonts and spacing.
- Metric extraction: Derives critical financial indicators such as net change in cash and ending balances.
Each stage ensures the document is clean, accurate, and underwriting-ready before being pushed into decision systems.
Governance and Quality Control
Heron’s automated scrubbing maintains strict controls to protect accuracy and compliance.
- Audit trail creation: Every scrub result is timestamped and stored with confidence levels.
- Version management: Old and new scrubs are stored separately to preserve data lineage.
- Access restrictions: Only authorized users can adjust scrub parameters or review flagged items.
- Exception tracking: Low-confidence or inconsistent results are routed to manual review queues.
- SOC 2 compliance: All scrubbing activities align with financial data handling standards.
- Automated reconciliation: Parsed and scrubbed figures are compared for internal consistency.
This governance layer guarantees the accuracy of financial data while keeping compliance standards intact.
Cross-Workflow Coordination
Scrubbing is part of Heron’s larger automation ecosystem. Each step connects directly to intake, parsing, and write-back processes.
- Upstream: Intake delivers classified cash flow statements directly into the scrubbing workflow.
- Downstream: Clean, structured results are written back to CRMs and underwriting tools.
- Exception management: Scrubbing results trigger missing-info requests or review assignments automatically.
- Underwriting readiness: Once scrubbing completes with high confidence, the deal moves to “ready to underwrite.”
- Continuous learning: Every manual correction trains Heron’s AI to improve future accuracy.
- Audit and monitoring: Dashboards provide full visibility into scrub throughput and flagging patterns.
This end-to-end integration keeps data flowing smoothly and eliminates bottlenecks across departments.
Implementation Best Practices
Teams introducing scrubbing automation should set structured rollout steps.
- Define validation rules: Decide which checks are mandatory for completeness and accuracy.
- Map scrubbed fields to CRM: Align extracted and validated fields with existing data structures.
- Monitor early runs: Review the first scrub results closely to fine-tune detection thresholds.
- Set exception review cadence: Assign regular intervals for handling flagged items.
- Train underwriters on new workflows: Make sure teams understand how to interpret scrub results and confidence scores.
- Review analytics dashboards: Use insights from flagged trends to optimize intake or broker performance.
Following this framework ensures smooth adoption and consistent scrubbing outcomes.
Benefits of Using Heron for Scrubbing Cash Flow Statements
- Speed: Automated checks complete in seconds instead of hours.
- Accuracy: Detects missing pages, miscalculations, and anomalies consistently.
- Transparency: Every scrub is logged and traceable.
- Scalability: Handles volume spikes without operational strain.
- Confidence: Clean, validated financials lead to better underwriting and risk control.
Heron’s scrubbing process transforms manual verification into an automated, repeatable function that drives efficiency and trust across the lending workflow.
FAQs About Scrub for Cash Flow Statements
How does Heron scrub cash flow statements?
Heron reviews every line and section of the document, verifying completeness, validating totals, and flagging inconsistencies. It converts raw data into structured, verified outputs ready for underwriting systems.
What issues can Heron detect during scrubbing?
Heron can detect missing pages, incorrect totals, unusual cash trends, and potential tampering. Each flag appears in the audit dashboard for review and resolution.
Can Heron handle non-standard or handwritten cash flow statements?
Yes. Heron uses OCR and pattern recognition to interpret varied formats, even scanned or handwritten documents, with confidence scoring for quality control.
How does scrubbing support underwriting?
Scrubbing ensures that only clean, validated data enters the underwriting process, reducing manual rework, delays, and decision risk.
What happens to flagged or low-confidence statements?
They are sent to an exception queue where reviewers can inspect the file, correct fields, or confirm accuracy before the deal moves forward.
