Staffing Agency Acquisition & SBA Underwriting Model – Excel XLSX

BENEFITS OF THIS DOWNLOADABLE EXCEL DOCUMENT

1. Judge the agency on gross profit rather than billings: SDE of $543,450 is 8.75% of revenue but 32.3% of gross profit, which is the lens a disciplined buyer and a lender both use.
2. Size the payroll-funding gap explicitly, $850,411 of AR and $766,435 of net working capital at a 50-day DSO, and charge its interest to cash flow before the DSCR is calculated.
3. Re-rate lumpy direct-hire fees, which are about 9% of revenue but near 30% of gross profit, and see roughly $227,000 of purchase price removed when they are not treated as recurring.

STAFFING EXCEL DESCRIPTION

Staffing Agency Acquisition & SBA Underwriting Model is an Excel template (XLSX) with a supplemental PDF document available for immediate download upon purchase.

This is a single-agency acquisition underwrite for a buyer purchasing a staffing or recruiting business with an SBA 7(a) loan, and for the lender reviewing it. Most staffing templates are startup or operating forecasts; this one is built on the numbers a bank and a disciplined buyer use.

The valuation error it intercepts is the top line. Revenue in staffing is largely a vanity metric, because roughly 70% of it is pass-through contractor wages. The model builds gross profit bottom-up from bill rate minus loaded pay rate on temp, placement fees on perm, and managed services. On $6,208,000 of revenue only $1,683,450 is gross profit, a blended 27.1% with a temp spread of 20.4% at a 1.42x markup. Contractor wages are 70.5% of revenue. It also re-rates the lumpy income: perm is about 9% of revenue but roughly 30% of gross profit, and treating one-off direct-hire fees as recurring is worth about $227,000 of overpayment avoided.

The second mechanism is working capital, and it is the one buyers discover late. You pay contractors weekly and collect at a DSO near 50 days, which puts $850,411 into accounts receivable and $766,435 into net working capital. That gap is funded on a separate payroll-funding or asset-based facility, not on the acquisition loan, and its roughly $78,176 of interest hits cash flow before the DSCR is struck. The model therefore shows a true DSCR of 1.53x, after a market-rate recruiter replaces the owner-biller at $130,000 and after the payroll-funding cost, next to the broker-style naive 2.48x.

The down-case reflects how the sector behaves. Staffing has severe operating leverage and is deeply cyclical, so a modest demand and spread contraction drops the DSCR to 0.64x, below a 1.25x floor.

The base case prices the agency at $1,630,350, which is 3.00x SDE of $543,450 and about 0.26x revenue, on a total project of $1,786,074 with an SBA loan of $1,355,128, leverage of 75.9% and a 20% equity injection. Adjusted EBITDA is $413,450. Other outputs include recurring-spread coverage of 5.38x, a 24.7% debt yield, a seller-note standby lever, a goodwill valuation-trigger flag at $500,000, and three profiles from light-industrial and clerical at 2.75x to professional and direct-hire forward at 3.50x.

What it does not claim. This is not white space: other marketplaces sell staffing operating and startup forecasts, and the differentiation here is the acquisition and SBA engineering plus the spread and working-capital honesty, not a first-ever claim. There is no IRR by design and the 3.88x five-year MOIC is leverage-amplified. It is an educational tool, not advice; verify the payroll registers, the AR aging, client concentration and the workers-comp mod before relying on any number.

Source: Best Practices in Staffing, Integrated Financial Model Excel: Staffing Agency Acquisition & SBA Underwriting Model Excel (XLSX) Spreadsheet, ProformaWorks