What the cold room does to the sheet
A loan meeting for a second cold room is rarely about the prose. The person across the table wants to know whether the compressors’ electricity, the extra stock, and the purchase price can share a month without the cash line breaking. We start from the last twelve months of purchases, not from a template with the company name typed at the top.
The first room is already there. That matters. A model that treats the second room as a new company will double the rent, forget that the same buyer is paying both, and make the wages look like a hiring plan. In the jobs we see from Botanica and the markets, the family is already in the shop. The new cost is power, metal, and the weeks when the room is full and the invoices are not.
Three prices, then the power bill
Base is the price on the last invoice that was actually paid, freight included, converted on that day. Tight moves the purchase currency by the amount the owner is willing to name out loud, and it slips the largest buyer by the delay they have already caused once. Eighteen days is a common slip in these files. It is not a round “thirty days overdue” invented to look cautious. Stretch is the supplier’s prepayment clause, the one already printed in the contract, switched on while the new room is being filled for the first time.
The power line is separate from those three. Compressors do not care which price case you prefer. We put a monthly figure taken from the existing room, adjusted for the extra volume, and we show it in all three cases. If the only difference between cases is a hopeful sales line, the sheet is not finished.
How long the document should be
Twenty-eight pages has been enough for this kind of meeting. We once drafted 41, and the extra pages were history the banker was never going to read while the clock ran. The document has to say what the cells cannot: who signs a guarantee, what happens to stock if a buyer in the north pays late, and why this room is not a photocopy of the first one. The deck, if the meeting is an hour, stays near 11 slides. The argument should happen in the workbook, where a change in the tonne price moves margin, cash, and cover together.
We do not write that the loan will be approved. The pack is there so the meeting can be held with the numbers and the sentences in the same place. If your meeting is a cold room, a warehouse, or any other box that consumes power and stock, send the brief with the last twelve months and the date of the room.