CMA data format for a bank loan: the forms, the years, and how a bank reads them

What CMA data is

CMA data is the set of statements a borrower gives a bank for a working capital limit or a term loan, all on the same run of years; the name is that of the Credit Monitoring Arrangement in a Reserve Bank circular on lending discipline. OptiReports sets it out in six forms, numbered here Form I to Form VI: the limits held and sought, the operating statement, the balance sheet, the current assets and current liabilities, the working capital assessment and the funds flow. Canara Bank, for one, lists it among the documents for working capital finance.

ICAI's Guidance Note on Audit of Banks describes the bank's side: audited financial statements are entered into a spreadsheet template as part of CMA data for ratio analysis.

Preparing it is mostly judgement: recasting audited accounts on the lending bank's classification, estimating the current year, writing projections that hold together across every form, and filling in what the books never carried.

The six forms and what each carries

The six forms as OptiReports titles them, their heads, the sheet each prints on in the Generic CMA workbook, and which kind of CMA prints it, Basic or Advanced: a CA picks one for each report.

OptiReports itself numbers only Forms I, II, III and V. Beside the forms, both kinds carry the Depreciation Schedule, DSCR Calculation, Key Ratios and Installment Schedule sheets, and an Advanced CMA adds Cost & Means, Capacity Utilisation, Cash Flow Statement and Sensitivity Analysis.

The years it spans

The three kinds of year column for a limit sought in 2026-27, under the word OptiReports prints beneath each year in the workbook.

How many of each is the bank's call. Union Bank of India's checklist for credit proposals above ₹ 2,00,00,000, for one, asks for CMA data with projections, the audited balance sheets of the last three years where applicable, a provisional balance sheet where the immediately preceding year's audit is not available, and for a term loan, projections up to the loan's tenor.

How a bank reads it

Five measures a bank reads in CMA data, what each shows, and where OptiReports prints it. The arithmetic of MPBF and DSCR is worked in the guide on MPBF by the Tandon method and DSCR.

The Reserve Bank withdrew all its instructions on MPBF in April 1997 and left banks free to assess working capital within prudential guidelines and exposure norms, by the turnover method, the cash budget system, MPBF with necessary modifications or any other system of their own.

Preparing it from audited accounts

By hand, from a client's audited accounts, the work runs in this order.

• Ask the bank which format it wants and how many audited and projected years, before any figure goes in.
• Take each closed year from the audited financial statements, or from provisional accounts where the latest audit is not done, so every figure traces to a balance sheet.
• Recast the balance sheet on the lending bank's classification, settling where cash credit, an overdrawn current account, term loan instalments due within the year and creditors in debit go.
• Split stock into raw material, stock in process and finished goods, and receivables into domestic and export, since holding levels are read item by item.
• Build the estimated year from the books to date and a reasoned view of the months still to run.
• Write the projections from the client's plan and carry them through every form, so each projected balance sheet balances and the funds flow ties.
• Fill Form I and the annexures from papers the books do not hold: the sanction letter, the project report, the fixed asset register and capacity figures.
• Read the ratios across all the years before the file goes.

Where the figures are read again

The holding levels in a CMA outlive the sanction. Drawing power is struck on declared stock net of the stipulated margin, unpaid stock left out, and ICAI's Guidance Note on Audit of Banks has the branch auditor compare stock and book debts with the levels assumed at assessment where the bank's policy counts trade creditors only above the level assumed then.

For a large advance, the long form audit report format the branch auditor obtains from the branch sets the borrower's key indicators for the last two audited years beside the projections for the current year: turnover, profit, net worth, the current ratio, the stock turnover ratio and total outstanding liabilities to total net worth.

Which items count as current is the bank's call too. The Reserve Bank's master circular of 1 July 2009 to urban co-operative banks said that with MPBF, inventory norms and the minimum current ratio withdrawn, classifying current assets and current liabilities had ceased to be mandatory, so a CMA prepared on one bank's classification may need recasting for another.

The Reserve Bank's Credit Risk Management Directions, 2025 for urban co-operative banks list meaningful scrutiny of the borrower's quarterly progress reports, operating statements and balance sheets among the measures a lender can take to watch the end use of funds, so the bank may ask for them again after sanction.

What OptiReports does

OptiReports builds a CMA on one entity's books across several years. The historical figures come from Tally, from a return, where an ITR-3 or ITR-5 JSON maps balance sheet and profit and loss straight in, or are typed in after Skip and enter manually. From Tally it does what a CA would recast by hand: cash credit and OD split into short-term borrowings, not term loans; creditors with debit balances move to the asset side; stock split into raw material, WIP and finished goods. A ledger it cannot place is listed as unmapped for you to assign; where the AI is asked for a line, suggestions come from a closed list of real form lines, never invented, and nothing applies until you accept it, or assign the line yourself from a list. A new enterprise, not yet operating, has the estimated year and projections only, no historical years.

It prints in two templates, Generic CMA and Bank of Baroda, and hands over an Excel workbook and a bank-ready PDF; the Bank of Baroda workbook adds five of the bank's own sheets: Section II, Financials (IBA Format), Highlights (MCDC), Financial Highlights and Production and Sales. The State Bank of India, Punjab National Bank and Canara Bank templates are marked coming soon, as are the Stock Statement and QIS Report.

Form V works the bank finance under Tandon Method I, Tandon Method II and the Nayak Committee's turnover method. The checks compare the current ratio with a configured minimum, TOL to TNW with a configured maximum and DSCR in each projection year with a configured minimum, the thresholds coming from each bank's own configuration. The projections assistant can fill the estimated year and the projected years from the latest historical year, on assumptions set once (sales growth, debtor, inventory and creditor days), taking capex and depreciation from the depreciation schedule where it has assets and, in an Advanced CMA, term loans from the loan schedules, with judgment lines left to you on purpose. Next year's CMA starts from this year's projections.

It leaves to the CA what only the CA can supply: the loan sought, entered in the borrower's Basic Data before the report is created and saved as the report's proposed limit; the rest of Form I, from the sanction letter or the application; the Cost of Project & Means of Finance and Capacity Utilisation annexures; any asset bought in the estimated or projected years, for the depreciation schedule; the projections themselves; and any recasting the lending bank's own classification calls for. The sanction is the bank's. The same module also carries the tax audit report, which is another job.