Leverage / base / 1 to 3 months
whether what the owner takes out of the business is consistent with what the business generates, read in both directions. Leg A (over-extraction) fires when owner cash out (salary, guaranteed payments, draws, and distributions over a trailing window) runs ahead of the operating cash flow that funds it AND owner equity declined across the same window, so the business is being decapitalized while the profit and loss statement still looks acceptable. Leg B (under-payment) fires when the working owner is paid materially less than the company pays for comparable labor it hires, so reported profit is absorbing an unpriced labor subsidy and the margin the owner manages against is overstated. This is a READ of a relationship between two numbers already in the books: it does NOT opine on reasonable compensation, perform the IRS reasonable-compensation analysis, price equity, value the business, or judge whether a distribution was lawful. The full specification, primitives, and the derivation of every constant live in Part [redacted] under "Owner-Pay Sustainability"; this section is the base-signal summary.
Over-extraction decapitalizes a business slowly and invisibly: the profit statement can look acceptable for a long time while the owner's equity and the company's cash reserves quietly bleed away. Under-payment does the opposite kind of damage, flattering reported profit and hiding the true cost of running the business, which leads to decisions made against an overstated margin. Either way, the owner is managing against a number that is not telling the whole truth.
On the extraction side, distributions and draws feel comfortable but the bank balance and the owner's stake keep drifting down. On the under-payment side, the business looks profitable partly because the owner is working for far less than a replacement hire would cost. In both cases the headline profit does not match the lived cash reality.
Compare your total pay and draws against the cash your operations actually generate over a trailing window, and set extraction at a level the business can fund without eroding its equity. If you are paying yourself well below what you would pay someone to do your job, price that gap in so you can see your real margin. Either way, manage against a picture that reflects the true cost and true capacity of the business, not a flattered one.
Talia Grant, the illustrative owner of Grant and Co., took about 410,000 in combined salary, draws, and distributions over the year while the business generated only about 300,000 of operating cash.
The owner drew out more cash than the operations produced, and over the same window the owner's equity in the business fell rather than held. The profit and loss statement still looked acceptable, so nothing on the surface flagged a problem, but the company was being decapitalized to fund the extraction. The bank balance and the owner's stake both drifted down together.
Talia concludes her draw is running ahead of what the business can sustain and must set extraction at a level operating cash can actually fund.
Exact thresholds, formulas, and severity bands are omitted from this public view. The full methodology, with every figure, is available in the authenticated app.
This signal reports not applicable when owner cash movements cannot be told apart from ordinary payroll and equity, because unlabeled accounts are not evidence. Each leg is otherwise suppressed on its own when the inputs that leg needs are absent.
The owner-benchmark leg needs an owner-versus-employee split of headcount and payroll that a QuickBooks export does not carry, so that leg is always suppressed for a QuickBooks-ingested company while the over-extraction leg still evaluates from the same import. An unevaluated leg is never treated as a passing leg.
The exact thresholds, the formula, and your own figures are in the authenticated app. See it against a real, simulated dataset for Integra Executive Services, our public demo company, or connect your own QuickBooks Online account.