Corrections

1. The policy

Errors are corrected in place and logged below. Corrections are not made silently. If a figure changes materially, the entry says what it was, what it is now, and why it changed.

The site does not remove a page or a figure because someone dislikes it. A lender that appears with a high cancellation rate, for example, appears that way because the SBA file says so, and the remedy for a disputed figure is to show that the arithmetic or the source is wrong, not to ask for removal. Where a dispute is genuine but unresolved, that is noted on the page rather than settled by deletion.

2. How to report an error

Use the contact form and choose "a correction". The more of the following you can include, the faster it can be resolved:

• The exact URL of the page.
• The figure as shown, copied precisely.
• What you believe it should be.
• The basis for that: a source, a calculation, or a description of what you think has gone wrong.

Reports are read by a person. Substantiated errors in a computed figure are treated as urgent, because the same fault usually affects many pages at once.

3. Kinds of error, and what happens

An arithmetic or pipeline error. The most serious kind, because it is systematic. The ingest is fixed, every derived file is regenerated, and the log records the scope of what changed. If the fault affected a headline figure, the entry says so explicitly.

A classification error. A business grouped into an industry that does not describe it, usually because the NAICS code in the federal file is approximate. These cannot generally be corrected here, because the site reports what the source says. Where the pattern is systematic it is noted on the methodology page.

A lender name error. Bank names are normalised so that one institution does not appear as several. If an institution is split across two entries, or two distinct institutions have been merged into one, that is a fixable fault and worth reporting.

An error in the writing. A mischaracterisation of how a mechanism works, or a claim stated more confidently than the evidence supports. These are corrected and logged like any other.

4. Errors in the source data

Some errors are not ours. The SBA file contains occasional impossible values, and this site filters the ones it can identify: interest rates outside 0.5% to 30%, terms outside 1 to 360 months, and funded loans with a gross approval of zero. Those rules are stated on the methodology page.

Where a figure is wrong because the federal record is wrong, this site cannot fix it and will not quietly adjust it. It will say so. Corrections to the underlying record are a matter for the SBA.

5. Correction log

No corrections have been recorded yet. The site was first published with data as of 30 June 2026, and this section will list every subsequent change with its date, the pages affected, and what changed.

Two things found during the initial build are recorded here because they would otherwise be invisible, and because they are the errors most likely to be repeated by anyone else working with this file.

• Fiscal year window. An early version of the ingest ran from FY2010, which produced a trend rising from zero because the SBA did not use the change-of-ownership code before FY2018. The window was moved to FY2019, the first fully coded year. No page was published with the earlier figures.
• Cancelled approvals. An early version counted all approvals as acquisitions, which overstated volume by the 3,965 loans that were approved and then cancelled, plus 2,119 approved but not yet disbursed. Only disbursed loans are now counted, and the cancellation rate is published separately. No page was published with the earlier figures.