9 gates. 1 buyer.Or you don't pay.

What are the 9 gates a merchant clears before the record is released?

9 gates, published in full, with the reason each one exists. They are not a preference and they are not tuned per buyer. A record that misses 1 of them is not a record you are invoiced for, which is what makes printing them worth anything: a minimum nobody can check is a marketing sentence, and a minimum with a credit behind it is a term.

Misses any of these? You don't pay. The merchant hits submit and the record is in your CRM about 50 milliseconds later. Not a nightly CSV, not a portal to log into, not aged data resold. The mechanism behind it is on how it works and the price is on pricing. The rest of this page is the argument for each minimum, because a number with no reasoning behind it is a number a buyer is right to distrust.

Why does the applicant have to be the owner, and why is the phone answered first?

The applicant has to be the owner because a non-signer cannot take the deal. An office manager can describe the business accurately, answer every question honestly and still be unable to sign anything, so the dial is spent on a conversation that cannot end in a funded advance. Owner is the 1 gate that decides whether the other 8 matter.

The phone is the same idea at the other end of the record. A number nobody picks up is not a lead. It is the only field that cannot be typed in: the number is dialled and answered before the record is released to anyone. That is what stops a file with perfect figures and a dead line reaching your invoice.

Why must a merchant be asking for $20,000 and trading for 12 months?

$20,000 is the minimum on requested capital because below it the advance does not carry the cost of funding it. The underwriting, the documents and the servicing on a small advance cost close to what they cost on a large one, so a merchant asking for a few thousand dollars produces work that the deal cannot pay for. The minimum is set at $20,000 rather than higher so it excludes the deals that cannot work without excluding the ordinary ones.

12 months in business is the minimum because under a year there is no history to underwrite. Seasonality has not run once, the deposit pattern has no baseline to compare against, and a strong 4 months tells a funder almost nothing about the 4 that follow. 12 months is the point where the bank statements start answering questions instead of raising them.

Why $200,000 in annual revenue and $15,000 in monthly deposits?

$200,000 in annual revenue sets the ceiling on what can responsibly be advanced. It is the figure that decides whether a $20,000 request is a routine working-capital advance or a number the business cannot absorb, and it is the reason the 2 minimums are published together rather than separately.

$15,000 in monthly deposits is checked separately from revenue, with statements attached, and the separation is the point. Deposits are the repayment source. Revenue is a claim; deposits are evidence. A business can report $200,000 in revenue and bank a fraction of it through the account being debited, and the only field that exposes that gap is the one asking what actually lands in the account each month.

Why 580 FICO and 2 or fewer open positions?

580 is the lowest score most funders in this band will look at. It is not a prime credit standard and it is not meant to be: merchant cash advance exists largely for files a bank has already declined. Publishing 580 rather than a higher number keeps the record honest about the band it belongs to.

2 or fewer open positions is the second half of the same judgement. A third position is where stacking starts to break repayment: 3 daily or weekly debits against 1 deposit stream compete with each other and with payroll, and the file that looked fundable on revenue stops being fundable on cash flow. The gate is set at 2 because that is where the arithmetic turns.

Why does the file have to be clean of defaults, liens and bankruptcies?

No defaults, liens or bankruptcies, because that gate removes the files that will not clear underwriting no matter how good the rest of the record looks. A prior default on an advance, an open tax lien against the deposit account or a bankruptcy on the record ends most files before the offer stage, and a lead that ends there costs the buyer the full dial and returns nothing.

This is the gate that most obviously exists for the buyer rather than for us. Every record it removes is one we already paid to advertise for and cannot sell, which is the arrangement running through all 9 gates.

What does a lead not tell you?

A lead tells you what the merchant answered and which minimum each answer cleared. It does not tell you that he will pick up on your second call, that he will send statements, that he will accept your offer, or that the deal will fund. We sell the lead, not the funded deal.

Contact rate, close rate and funded volume depend on your criteria, your states, your speed to contact and your sales process, none of which we control. Our written commitments are limited to: exclusivity, the published qualification gates, the consent record, live delivery, and the replacement terms. Everything past that line is your own sales operation, and no lead seller who tells you otherwise is describing something they can control.

No contact-rate or close-rate figure is published anywhere on this site. We have not measured them across real delivery volume, so there is nothing to publish. Limited time: start with the free 10 and measure them in your own CRM.