Guides
How to qualify, and which of the four gates you are actually failing
Real requirements for seven products side by side, a ninety day plan that moves the lines you control, and the documents to have ready before you apply.
Qualifying is not one test. It is four gates, and every product weights them differently. Most owners who believe they cannot qualify are failing one gate at one product tier, and would sail through a different product on the same file. Finding out which gate is failing takes about ten minutes.
Work through them in order. There is no point improving your credit score if the entity is administratively dissolved, and no point gathering tax returns if you are applying for a product that never reads them.
Gate one: time in business
This is the only gate you cannot influence, which makes it the one to check first. The cliffs are at roughly six months, twelve months, and twenty four months, and each one opens a materially different set of products.
Under six months, working capital is largely closed and the realistic routes are invoice factoring if you have creditworthy customers, equipment financing against a titled asset, a startup loan backed by personal credit, or business credit cards. Between six and twenty four months, advances and short term working capital open up. Past two years, term loans, lines of credit and SBA become genuinely available. Time in business is measured from the entity formation or the EIN date, not from when you started the trade. See the time in business requirement.
Gate two: revenue
Revenue determines both eligibility and size. Most working capital desks want at least $10,000 to $15,000 a month in genuine deposits, and the offers get meaningfully better above $50,000 a month.
What counts is narrower than owners expect. Transfers between your own accounts, loan proceeds, owner injections and refunds all get stripped out to reach true revenue, which is frequently 10 to 30 percent below the gross deposit total on the statement summary. Size your expectations off the stripped number, not the printed one. And on the application, round down. See revenue requirements.
Gate three: bank health, which decides most files
This is the gate almost nobody prepares for and the one that determines the outcome on working capital files more than the other three combined. It is three numbers.
- Average daily balance
- Read as a percentage of monthly revenue. Under 2 percent is thin and prices badly. Six percent and up is strong. See average daily balance.
- Deposit count
- Fifteen or more separate credits a month reads as an operating business. Under five reads as concentration regardless of the dollars.
- Negative days and NSF items
- Zero to one negative day a month is fine. Five or more, or four NSF items, moves you out of most boxes entirely.
The good news is that all three respond to habit changes rather than capital, and all three can be moved inside sixty days. That is faster than fixing credit and considerably faster than waiting for time in business.
Gate four: credit, and how little it usually matters
Personal credit is the fourth question on a working capital file and the first on a bank file. That single distinction explains most of the confusion in this market.
For advances and short term working capital there is often no hard floor, and files in the 500s fund regularly on strong statements. Above 600 the line of credit market opens. Above 650 term loans become realistic. Above 680, with two years of returns, SBA and bank products come into range. Business credit, meaning a D-U-N-S and trade lines, matters for vendor terms and cards rather than for working capital. More detail in credit score requirements.
What each product actually requires
These are typical working ranges across the funding partners we place with. Every desk runs its own box and there are exceptions in both directions, but a file sitting well outside a row is a file applying to the wrong product.
| Product | Time in business | Annual revenue | Typical credit | Secured by | Time to fund |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Merchant cash advance | 4 to 6 months | $120,000 | No practical minimum | Blanket UCC, performance guarantee | 24 to 48 hours |
| Short term working capital | 6 to 12 months | $180,000 | 500 and up | Blanket UCC, personal guarantee | 2 to 5 days |
| Business line of credit | 6 to 24 months | $200,000 | 600 and up | Blanket UCC, personal guarantee | 2 to 7 days |
| Invoice factoring | Any, startups included | Depends on the invoices | Your customer's credit matters more | The receivables themselves | 3 to 10 days |
| Equipment financing | 6 months to 2 years | $150,000 | 600 and up | The equipment | 2 to 10 days |
| Business term loan | 2 years | $250,000 | 650 and up | Blanket or specific, personal guarantee | 3 to 14 days |
| SBA 7(a) | 2 years typical | $100,000 and up | 680 and up | Collateral to the extent available, personal guarantee | 30 to 90 days |
Read that table for the row you fit rather than the row you want. An owner at fourteen months with a 590 score and clean statements is a strong working capital candidate and a hopeless SBA candidate, and applying to SBA anyway costs six weeks and produces a decline that teaches nothing.
The ninety day plan
If you are not applying this week, this is what ninety days of deliberate work does. Nothing on this list costs money, and together these changes routinely move a file a full pricing tier.
- Week one, the paperwork. Confirm the entity is active and in good standing with the state, pull the EIN confirmation letter, make sure the registered agent and address are current, and open a dedicated business checking account if you do not have one.
- Week one to four, the banking habits. Stop sweeping cash out nightly. Deposit daily instead of batching weekly. Move your largest recurring draft to just after your deposits land rather than just before. Link overdraft protection so an NSF becomes a transfer.
- Week four to eight, the positions. Clear any open advance if you can, or get a payoff quote so you know the number. Pull your own personal credit and dispute anything genuinely wrong. Get any tax lien onto a documented payment plan.
- Week eight to twelve, the file. Two clean statement cycles are now closed. Download every page of every statement as a PDF, write two sentences about anything unusual, and submit once, to two desks whose box fits.
- Throughout, do not open new accounts or move money between them. A new bank account resets your history to zero and internal transfers get stripped from revenue and then questioned.
The documents to have ready
Having these in one folder before you apply is worth about two days of elapsed time, because stipulations rather than analysis are what make funding slow.
- Three to six months of business bank statements, full PDF, every page, every account
- Driver's license or government ID for each owner above 20 percent
- EIN confirmation letter and formation documents
- Certificate of good standing if your state issues one cheaply
- A voided check for the operating account
- A payoff letter for any position you have cleared or intend to clear
- For term loans and SBA: two years of business and personal tax returns, a profit and loss statement, a balance sheet, and a debt schedule
Nobody is unfundable at every product. Plenty of people are unfundable at the one they applied to.
What we do with this
Exp Capital Solutions is a broker. We do not lend, approve or price anything. What we do is run your file against these four gates before it goes anywhere, tell you which gate is actually failing, and then put it in front of the funding partners whose box matches, rather than sending it everywhere and hoping. When the honest answer is that ninety days of work would move you a full tier, we say that and we put the calendar reminder in ourselves. That advice costs us a deal today. It is still the right answer, because the file you submit in October is worth more than the one you submit tomorrow. See how to apply when you are ready.