A merchant cash advance gets working capital into your business in hours, not weeks, and you repay it as a share of your sales rather than in fixed monthly instalments. That makes it fast and flexible. It also makes it more expensive than a bank loan, so the honest question is not whether you can get one, but whether it is the right tool for what you need.
We fund Canadian businesses with merchant cash advances every day, so this page tells you how ours actually works: what it costs, who qualifies, how fast the money lands, and the situations where you would be better off with something else. Including, sometimes, something other than us.
What a merchant cash advance is
An MCA is not a loan. We advance you a lump sum today and buy a portion of your future sales at a discount. You repay automatically as a percentage of your daily or weekly card sales, so when business is busy you repay faster, and when it is slow you repay less. There is no fixed monthly payment to find and no fixed end date. The repayment flexes with your revenue.
That structure is what makes an MCA suit businesses with steady card sales but uneven cash flow. Restaurants, shops, salons, auto shops, seasonal businesses. The kind of business a bank often struggles to serve.
How much you can get, and what it costs
We fund advances from $10,000 to $300,000. The amount depends on your sales volume, because repayment comes out of those sales. As a rough guide, most businesses can access somewhere between one and two times their average monthly card sales.
The cost is set by a factor rate, not an interest rate, and ours runs from 1.1 to 1.5 depending on our assessment of your business. Here is what that means in plain terms, because too many providers leave it vague. A factor rate of 1.3 on a $25,000 advance means you repay $32,500 in total. The $7,500 difference is the cost of the capital. If your card sales run around $3,000 a day and we collect 10% of them, you would repay roughly $300 a day, clearing the advance in about five months. Those figures are illustrative, not a quote, but they show you the shape of the deal before you ever apply.
A factor rate is not the same as an APR, and comparing the two directly will mislead you. If you want to understand exactly how factor rates work and how to compare the true cost against other funding, our plain-English guide to factor rates walks through it.
How do I qualify?
The bar is deliberately low, because we weigh your recent business performance more heavily than your credit history. There are three requirements:
- In business for at least 6 months
- Gross monthly revenue above $15,000 for 4 consecutive months
- Credit score over 500
A patchy credit file a few years back does not rule you out. We are looking at how your business is performing now.
What documents you need
We keep the paperwork light. To apply you need a signed application, your last 4 months of business bank statements, a void cheque, and ID. That is it. No business plan, no forecasts, no mountain of forms.
How fast can I get the money?
Once you have sent your funding specialist the required documents, your business is typically funded within 8 to 24 hours. The bottleneck is almost always getting the documents in, not our decision, so the faster you send them, the faster you are funded.
Here is what that timeline actually looks like, so you can plan around it:
- Same day: you send your last four months of business bank statements, a signed application, a void cheque and ID. A decision usually comes back within a few hours
- Same day or the next: we confirm the offer in writing, with the amount, the factor rate and the percentage of sales we will collect. You read it and ask questions before signing anything
- Within 8 to 24 hours of signing: the funds land in your business account
Three things slow this down, and all three are avoidable. Partial statements, so send full months rather than screenshots of a banking app. A business account you cannot easily download statements from, which is worth sorting out before you need money urgently. And an existing advance you have not mentioned, which we will find anyway, and which is far easier to work around if you tell us at the start.
