How repayment behaves
A merchant cash advance, as a category, is repaid by sending the funder a share of your receipts, typically through daily or weekly remittances. That follows deposits that arrive daily. It is a poor match for a business whose money lands in a few big payments each month, and it can be hard on a business with a slow season, because the remittances continue while deposits thin out.
A county with two calendars
Santa Rosa is the county seat of Sonoma County and, per Wikipedia, the largest city in California's Wine Country, with 178,127 residents. The same article lists 12 neighborhood shopping centers and 17 commercial districts as of 2014, including Santa Rosa Plaza, Coddingtown Mall and Montgomery Village, which is an open-air mall with more than 70 shops. Retail and food businesses in places like these take money at the counter every day. The county's other calendar is agricultural and visitor-driven: Wikipedia notes millions of tourists each year and a farm economy in grapes, hops, apples, dairy and poultry.
| Business | How money arrives | Fit with frequent remittances |
|---|---|---|
| Cafe or restaurant in a shopping district | Card and cash daily | Natural fit |
| Tasting room or visitor-facing shop | Busy weekends, quiet weekdays | Fits if weekly average is steady; strains in the off-season |
| Farm-service or equipment supplier | Invoices around harvest | Awkward; deposits are lumpy |
| Professional office | Monthly billing | Usually a poor fit |
Worked example, for illustration only
Say a Santa Rosa bakery deposits about $2,800 on a normal day and $1,700 in a slow week, and takes a $40,000 advance repaid at a flat daily amount. The same dollar figure leaves the account every day, so a slow week costs a larger share of what came in. Over a quarter with two slow weeks, the owner needs to be certain rent, payroll and flour still clear after the remittance. These are round numbers to show the mechanics, not our terms.
What to read before you sign
- The total you will repay, not only the amount you receive.
- How often funds are pulled and what happens in a short week.
- Whether early repayment changes what you owe.
- Any fees taken from the amount advanced.
If you already hold an advance and the pulls are crowding out payroll, the Santa Rosa MCA relief page is a better starting point than a second advance.
How we look at an application
We fund $25,000 to $5,000,000, with funding in as little as 24 hours once approved. We consider FICO scores of 500 and up, ask for about three months of business bank statements and do not require tax returns. The application takes about five minutes and uses a soft credit pull. Sole proprietors can apply. Compare with working capital or revenue-based financing, read the Sonoma County overview, or start your application.