Companion files
Private Credit Beyond Direct Lending: Receivables, Equipment, Consumer, Housing, Royalties and Specialty Assets
The four Excel workbooks that go with the book, corrected where they were wrong: the borrowing base of Appendix C running live off a loan tape of 1,880 contracts, the Meridian transaction of Chapter 22 from screening to the stressed outcome, the Appendix E and G calculators, and the six appendix checklists. Around them: three of the same models with the inputs emptied, twelve working documents to print, forty questions that mark themselves, and three cases the book names and never takes to a number. 94 figures are checked against the book, and every checks sheet ends ALL OK.
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Ten workbooks, the printable documents and the read-me. Each group below can also be downloaded on its own. Last revised 24 September 2026.
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These carry the book’s own figures, so that every number it prints can be traced to a live formula. The first three close on a checks sheet. The four together (266 KB).
Chapter 5 and Appendix C
Appendix C closes with an instruction: every line should be produced from the loan tape by the servicer and independently verifiable by the lender from the same tape. This workbook does exactly that. A synthetic tape of 1,880 equipment finance contracts sits behind it, carrying obligor, product, introducer, channel, jurisdiction, balance, tenor, delinquency, deposit and security registration. Every eligibility exclusion and every concentration excess on the borrowing base is a formula over that tape, not a number someone typed. Change the maximum tenor, the minimum deposit or the excluded introducer and the whole calculation moves. On this tape the criteria exclude 17 per cent of the pool, which is what they excluded at Meridian — and the point is not the coincidence but that the number is produced rather than asserted. The advance rate sheet runs the Chapter 5 method: base case cumulative net loss of 2.4 per cent, a downside multiple of 2.5, a margin of 1.5 per cent for servicing and data risk, an 88 per cent advance rate, 12 per cent enhancement, a break-even loss multiple of 5.0 times. It also prices what the 92 per cent Meridian asked for would have meant, and shows that the enhancement clears its own floor even at the most conservative multiple Appendix G allows. Revised: at 92 per cent the stressed loss of 5.4 per cent still leaves 2.6 points of enhancement, which the chapter says it would not.
Download the workbook184 KBChapter 22
Screening, diligence, structuring, the first eighteen months and the stressed case, each on its own sheet, with every number the chapter states in prose put somewhere it can be tested. What EUR 340,000 and nine weeks bought, quantified. The channel loss decomposition, which turns out to say something slightly different from the sentence above it. The trigger headroom before month sixteen. The residual distribution of EUR 800,000 a quarter whose suspension mattered more than it looked, against a liquidity covenant with EUR 4 million of headroom. And then the run-off, modelled properly. The chapter says the facility is repaid to roughly 60 per cent of peak within nine months and substantially repaid within twenty, from a pool with a weighted average life of 31 months. Those two outcomes are reproduced by a pool of 24-month contracts, whose weighted average life is about 13 months; at a 31-month life the facility is still at 82 per cent of peak at month nine. A new sheet asks what Stage one implies: EUR 640 million on EUR 31 million a month, growing 22 per cent a year, is a book of 48-month contracts with a remaining term of about 34 months and a remaining life of about 19. The 31 months reads as a remaining term: on it the facility is at 67 per cent of peak at month nine and fully repaid at month 48, its final maturity. A second new sheet tests the chapter’s closing claims. At the 92 per cent Meridian asked for, the stressed loss still leaves 2.6 points of enhancement: the four points bought the size of the cushion, not the difference between repayment and a loss. The layered triggers ended the revolving period two months early, not a year, and a single 6.0 per cent loss trigger would never have fired. And the EUR 4 million of liquidity headroom covers fifteen months of the lost residual, not the six the chapter allows.
Download the workbook73 KBAppendices E and G, Chapters 4 and 5
Appendix E gives trigger rules with no numbers. Chapter 22 gives trigger levels with no rules. Nobody runs one against the other, so this workbook does. The level one delinquency trigger of 3.2 per cent implies an expected 60+ delinquency of 2.46 per cent; the level two trigger of 4.0 per cent implies 2.50. Four hundredths of a point apart — the two triggers were set from one expectation using the Appendix E rules and then rounded for the document, and nothing in the text says so. The same exercise recovers the excess spread floor of 3.5 per cent and the vintage base of 3.0 per cent, neither of which appears anywhere in the book. Also here: the Appendix A headroom monitor with its leads-or-lags column, the Appendix G three cases and the break-even solve, and the emergence chain that explains where Chapter 5’s roughly a year late comes from — three months to default, six to sale, three to recognition. At Meridian’s origination rate that year is EUR 372 million of assets bought after the book had already turned.
Download the workbook35 KBAppendices A, B, D, F, H and I
The five-question structure review, the originator diligence checklist in six sections, the eligibility drafting list, the servicing review with the cash control and backup questions Chapter 16 adds, the seventeen-segment reference table, and the allocator questions with the weak and strong answers the book gives for each. Every line carries a status, a date, an owner and a note, and a progress sheet puts all of them on one page. The segment table gains one column that is not in the book: the amortisation speed after a trigger, scored one to five so the table can be sorted on it. That is the column that decides how a position behaves when it goes wrong, and a portfolio built entirely from scores of one and two will be in every one of its problems for years rather than months.
Download the workbook36 KBThree of the workbooks with every input emptied. The checks sheets count what is still missing and test what holds for any inputs.
Appendices A, C, E and G · Chapters 5 and 22
The borrowing base, the Meridian model and the trigger and stress calculators, with the same formulas and every blue cell emptied. Paste your own loan tape and the borrowing base rebuilds itself; the checks sheet says when an obligor above the concentration limit is missing from the helper list. The month axes and the Appendix E and G rules are kept. The checklists workbook needs no blank version: it arrives empty.
The book’s inputs are listed in a text file inside the archive. Type them back in and the book’s figures come back with them: 17.2 per cent of the tape ineligible, a break-even of 5.0 times, level one at month sixteen.
Download the blank set157 KBTwelve pages to print and use. A4, with margins wide enough for US Letter.
Chapters 4 to 22 · Appendices A to I
Screening with the six requests and Chapter 4’s four numbers. The originator diligence checklist of Appendix B. A file review log with the three categories of finding. The Appendix C borrowing base certificate, with a column for the lender’s own recomputation. Eligibility drafting with the share of the pool each criterion excludes. The advance rate and the Appendix G cases. The trigger grid with its headroom. Servicing, cash control and the backup servicer. The ten clauses to read first. The monthly composition report, read before the performance report. The five-question structure review. And the allocator questions with the answers the book calls strong.
Download the documents32 KBA workbook that marks itself. Answer in the yellow cells; the marking fills in as you go.
All parts of the book
Six on foundations and the pool, eight on structure, six on the asset classes, seven on the machinery from SRT to what goes wrong, seven on the Meridian transaction and six on the three cases below. A score sheet counts your errors part by part: that is your revision list.
Download the questions18 KBNew material, not a restatement. Three situations the chapters name and never take to a number. Each case is one workbook: the note is the first sheet, the model is the rest, and a checks sheet closes it. Every assumption the book does not give is marked ADDED.
Chapters 4 and 21 · Case one
Chapter 4 says a book growing 60 per cent a year looks pristine on an aggregate delinquency ratio. On an ADDED delinquency curve, the same vintages show 2.87 per cent in a flat book and 2.31 in the growing one. Growth hides a worsening of 9.3 per cent a year in every vintage: the headline stays put while the newest vintage becomes 1.41 times as bad as the oldest. Stop the growth and the headline jumps to 3.48 with no change in underwriting. The same-age comparison shows it the first month.
Chapter 8 · Case two
Chapter 8 asks what the position is worth if 10 per cent of the back book needs refunds of interest and fees, and does not answer. Behind an 85 per cent advance, on ADDED loan terms, the redress costs EUR 6.69 million of a EUR 100 million pool. The senior is whole with 3.3 million to spare; it first loses when 15.0 per cent of the book is affected. If the affected loans are unenforceable instead of refunded, the threshold falls to 6.0 per cent and the chapter’s 10 costs the senior 6.7 million.
Chapters 6 and 21 · Case three
Chapter 6 says a receivables facility with no dilution reserve is undercollateralised from day one, and that three debtors can owe 60 per cent of a granular-looking ledger. On an ADDED ledger of EUR 60 million, an 85 per cent advance with no reserve is short on the day it is drawn once stressed dilution passes 5.5 per cent of sales; a consumer-goods seller at 8 per cent starts 3.0 million short. When one of the three large debtors fails, the unprotected senior loses 4.5 million; with the limit and the reserve 13.8 million of cover is left.
Download the three cases43 KB| Blue text | a hardcoded input — you may edit these |
| Black text | a formula — do not overtype these |
| Green text | a link to another sheet |
| Yellow fill | the assumptions that carry the answer |
| Checks sheet | the last sheet of each model: every control states its own verdict, and the file ends ALL OK |
| Amber fill | an input in the three cases |
94 figures are checked against the book across the first three workbooks, and all 94 reproduce. Each line carries its own tolerance, set to the precision the book actually prints, and each checks sheet ends ALL OK.
Five places are flagged on the sheet rather than quietly adjusted. Chapter 22 says Meridian’s deterioration is almost entirely channel mix; on the chapter’s own loss rates the mix shift explains 29 per cent of it, and product mix looks like the rest. The Stage five run-off, described above, is faster than the stated weighted average life produces. And three of the six decisions in “What made the difference” say more than the numbers do: the 92 per cent, the year of triggers and the liquidity path. None of them changes the chapter’s lesson. Reproducing a book’s numbers is the easy half of a companion workbook; the useful half is finding the places where the numbers say slightly more than the sentence does.
The related analysis takes one of these files' central results and works it through step by step.
Read the related analysis Browse Julian R. Sterling's booksThe workbooks open in Microsoft Excel, LibreOffice Calc, Google Sheets and Numbers; the PDF prints on A4 or US Letter. They use no macros and no add-ins, so nothing needs to be enabled or trusted. If your spreadsheet asks to update links on opening, decline — there are none.
The Asset-Based Finance Handbook by Julian R. Sterling. The workbooks reproduce the worked examples in the chapters; the book is where the reasoning behind them is set out. It is not yet on sale — these files are published ahead of it.
| 24 Sep 2026 | The four workbooks corrected; every checks sheet ends ALL OK (94 lines). The Meridian workbook gains two sheets: the chapter’s closing claims tested (at 92 per cent the stressed loss still leaves 2.6 points; the triggers saved two months, not a year) and the contract length Stage one implies, on which the 31 months is a remaining term. Three formulas fixed: the liquidity cover (15 months, not 1.7), the value of the catering points (EUR 3.95 million, not 0) and the commingling reserve in months of the facility’s collections (9.0, not 1.3). The run-off now uses the 15.8 per cent pool yield. Added: a blank set, twelve working documents, forty questions that mark themselves, and three cases. The book’s subtitle corrected in the header. |
The other books with companion files. The full list of titles is on the author page.