# Interim financials

In-house financial statements covering the months since the last tax return.

Deals close mid-year, so the freshest numbers are always unaudited ones, and lenders require them anyway because a tax return from last spring cannot show what the business is doing now. A seller who cannot produce them within a few days is telling you something about the bookkeeping you are buying. Read them against the same months last year rather than against the annual return, and expect them to be tidied up: internally prepared statements are where optimism lives.

In numbers: A [CIM](https://searchspheresource.com/glossary/cim) built on last December's numbers is stale by June. Diligence asks for interim financials, the year-to-date P&L and [balance sheet](https://searchspheresource.com/glossary/balance-sheet), and SBA's rulebook has the lender read them beside the same months a year earlier, dated within 120 days of submission. A $40,000 revenue slide hiding in the interims is exactly what they exist to catch.

Source: https://searchspheresource.com/glossary/interim-financials
Not dated: A definition is editorial: what a term means, why it matters, and an example. None of it reads a source that can go stale, so there is no date to take and a stamped one would be the build time wearing a costume.

Site index for machines: https://searchspheresource.com/llms.txt