Tuesday, May 6, 2008

How Much Can You Get From a Merchant Cash Advance?

It varies, but a Merchant Cash Advance typically ranges from $5,000-150,000 per location. It can be more than $150,000, but is not very often less than $5,000.

How much you can get from a Merchant Cash Advance depends a lot on the provider and what the business needs.

For example, since AdvanceMe is a well established industry leader, we have the financial strength to offer Merchant Cash Advances of $2 million or more…but these would be individual cases that don’t represent the norm.

On the other end of the spectrum, if a business only needed a couple hundred or maybe a few thousand dollars, this would typically not be the best financial vehicle to choose because approvals on smaller amounts are low in this industry.

How Can I Estimate How Much I Might Get for My Business?
To get a ballpark idea of how much you could access for your business using a Merchant Cash Advance, start by looking at your gross sales volume and identify the percentage of these sales handled by credit cards every month.

The amount of credit card sales processed monthly is usually a quick indicator of the actual amount you might be able to get from a Merchant Cash Advance. In most cases, a Merchant Cash Advance provider will be able to fund 100%-135% of your monthly credit sales volume. Do be wary of offers that are considerably higher than this amount—though they may be completely legitimate, they are certainly not the norm for this funding.

There are of course other factors to consider, such as what percentage of your total revenue is comprised of credit and debit cards. A higher volume of credit and debit card sales will allow for a larger funding amount, depending on the percentage these sales represent of the business’ total gross sales. Reputable providers establish caps on the amount of your gross sales they will retrieve from your credit card sales. The providers do this to help avoid hurting the business.

But examining the actual dollar amount of monthly credit and debit card sales is usually a good place to start.

Smaller Bites Can Satisfy Larger Needs
Keep in mind that this is an easily renewable source of working capital. So if your business needs $100,000 but your gross sales and credit card volumes only support a Merchant Cash Advance of $20,000, you might consider getting your money in smaller amounts more often. Once you have established a relationship with a provider, you can typically get a Merchant Cash Advance in less than 72 hours…making larger goals achievable despite a smaller sales volume.

In the end, how much you can get from a Merchant Cash Advance depends a lot on the financial strength of the provider and your business’ sales volume—both the gross sales, and the percentage of these sales handled by credit and signature-based debit cards.

What do you think?
Do you think it is better to be able to access a larger amount of money once annually, or be able to get smaller amounts quarterly?

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the opportunity to read this important info...