IN THIS GUIDE · Reconciling a lease, supplier contracts and a business plan into one accurate account
Start with the E-2 eligibility and application overview
Read the contracts before rewriting the plan
Signed documents describe what the investor actually did; a forecast describes an intention. When the two conflict, the contracts usually win, so start there. List the tenant name on the lease, the buyer named in supplier agreements, the premises, the equipment ordered and every amount already paid. E-2 turns on a real operating enterprise with capital committed and at risk, so a plan describing a different company than the one under contract weakens the whole submission. Take the amounts already paid as the firmest facts in the file, since money that has left an account is the clearest evidence of commitment available and it cannot be redescribed. Build outward from those payments: what they bought, under which agreement, in whose name. A plan written to fit that spine will be consistent because it started from what happened.
Decide which entity signs and owns
A lease signed personally, a deposit paid from a joint account and shares issued to a holding company can describe three different investors. Treaty nationality attaches to the individual and, where a company invests, to its ownership, so the chain must be traceable. Decide now whether contracts will be assigned to the operating entity, then document the assignment. Guessing at the structure later, after the money has moved, produces explanations that no amount of drafting can make consistent. Confirm treaty nationality from a passport at the same time, since it is binary, answerable in minutes and decisive, and households working through a document reconciliation sometimes never reach it. Where the enterprise will be owned by a company rather than an individual, map the shareholders and their nationalities as well, because the enterprise's own treaty character is a separate condition.
Version the file and log every amendment
Give each document a version, a signature date and a named person responsible for it. When a supplier reduces an order or the landlord agrees to a rent concession, record the amendment beside the original instead of quietly replacing the figure. A reviewer comparing an old draft against a current invoice will ask why they differ; an amendment log answers that in advance and keeps revenue assumptions honest when the plan is finally rewritten. Name a single person responsible for the log and tell the landlord, the broker and the suppliers to copy that person on every amendment. Version conflicts in a file of this kind almost always come from a change agreed verbally and confirmed by email to whoever happened to be in the conversation, and a standing copy instruction costs nothing and prevents most of them.
Fix a cut-off date for the final reconciliation
Contracts keep moving until the business opens, so choose the point at which the file is frozen and checked line by line. Everything signed after that date needs a decision about whether the case must be updated. Book the reconciliation while there is still time to correct a mismatch, not the week the application is due. Nothing in this preparation guarantees a visa, an admission, or permission to begin working on a chosen date. Set the freeze date early enough that the reconciliation can be repeated once, since the first pass through a file of this kind reliably finds items nobody expected and the second pass is what confirms they were corrected. Book both dates now. A reconciliation scheduled for the week an application is due is a reconciliation that will find problems it has no time to fix.
Sources reviewed 2026-09-07. This guide covers a preparation focus; it is not an individual eligibility assessment.