Which funding products does this apply to?

Merchant Cash Advance, Working Capital, Business Line of Credit, Revenue-Based Financing. Each has its own page listing the funders in this directory that offer it and what each one publishes about its terms.

Are the figures here quotes?

No. Every worked example is labelled illustrative and exists to show the arithmetic. What a particular lender charges is on that lender's page, where it publishes it at all.

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Where a page carries the green notice, its claims were checked against the sources listed at the end and a reviewer is named. Where it carries the amber one, nobody has verified it yet and you should confirm anything you plan to act on.

Are the examples real deals?

No. Every worked example is labelled illustrative and exists to show the arithmetic. What any particular lender charges is on that lender's page, where it publishes it.

Why do you never say what a typical rate is?

Because we cannot source it. A market average assembled from lenders who do not publish prices is a guess with a decimal point on it. Where a lender publishes a figure, we show that figure and say where it came from.

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No. It is general information about how these products work. Outcomes depend on your contract and your state, and a lawyer or accountant licensed where you are is the person to ask about your situation.

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Working negative days down to zero over one quarter

Timing changes buy you a couple of days. A cushion buys you the rest. The arithmetic shows which lever is worth the effort.

By Find Me Funders research desk Updated 14 September 2026 974 words 4 min read

Drafted with AI assistance. Not yet independently checked. Nobody has verified the claims on this page against a source, so treat the figures and legal points as a starting point rather than as settled, and confirm anything you are about to act on. How we check things.

Negative days are the cheapest thing to fix in a funding file and one of the most heavily weighted. Nobody publishes a threshold, and the honest reason is that there is not one — an underwriter reads the pattern, the cause and whether there is any balance behind it. But a statement with eleven negative days in a month and a statement with none describe two different levels of operating control, and moving between them is a ninety-day project with arithmetic you can run in advance.

What actually causes them

Not, usually, a revenue problem. The common cause is a mismatch between when large fixed debits hit and when deposits arrive, combined with an operating balance close to zero. A business can be comfortably profitable over the month and negative for a third of it.

Illustrative only —a 30-day month starting on a Monday, 22 banking days. Deposits of 1,180 on each banking day, so 25,960 in. Out: rent 4,200 on the 1st, payroll 6,800 on the 5th and again on the 20th, and a daily financing debit of 310 on each banking day, which is 6,820. Total out, 24,620. The business ends the month up 1,340 and the opening balance is 3,100.

Run it day by day and the balance goes negative on day 1 — rent of 4,200 against an opening 3,100 plus one day's deposit of 1,180 leaves −230 — recovers by day 2, then payroll on day 5 takes it to −3,550 where it sits through the weekend and claws back a day at a time until day 12. Then the second payroll on day 20 does it again.

Negative days: 11. Lowest balance: −3,550. Ending balance: 4,440.

Eleven negative days on a business that made money that month.

The two levers, measured

Lever one: move the fixed debits.Rent on the 1st lands before any meaningful deposit accumulation. Ask the landlord to move it to the 8th. Nothing else changes.

Negative days: 7. Lowest balance: −2,680.

Four days recovered for the cost of one conversation. Worth doing. Not sufficient.

Lever two: build a cushion.Add 2,500 of opening balance to the reordered month.

Negative days: 1. Lowest balance: −180.

Add 5,000 instead.

Negative days: 0. Lowest balance: +2,320.

The lesson in those four runs is specific: timing changes remove a few days, and a cushion sized a little above your worst single dip removes the rest. In this business the worst dip after reordering is 2,680, so a cushion of roughly 3,000 clears it and 5,000 clears it with margin. That is the number to aim at, and it is discoverable from your own statements in twenty minutes.

The ninety-day sequence

Weeks 1–2: measure.Export three months of transactions to a spreadsheet with a running balance. Mark every day the balance went below zero and note what caused the dip. You are looking for the largest single dip, because that sizes the cushion, and for the repeating cause, because that is what timing can fix.

Weeks 2–4: reorder what you control.In rough order of how easy they are to move: subscription and software renewals, insurance instalments, discretionary supplier payments, your own draw, rent, loan and lease payment dates. Ask each counterparty to move the debit date to two or three days after your reliably strongest deposit day. Most will; a landlord and a lender both prefer a payment that clears to one that bounces. Get any change confirmed in writing, and check the first cycle actually moved.

Weeks 2–4, in parallel: stop the returns.Arrange overdraft protection linked to a savings account. A transfer fee is unpleasant; a returned-item entry on a statement is permanent, costs more, and on a financing agreement can be an event of default independent of whether you caught up the next day.

Weeks 4–12: fund the cushion.Move a fixed amount on a fixed day into the operating account and do not spend it. If your worst dip is 2,700, target 4,000, and getting there at 500 a week takes eight weeks. Take it out of owner draw if it has to come from somewhere, and treat it as a fixed cost.

Week 12: verify on a clean statement.You need whole clean months, not a clean fortnight. Three consecutive months with zero negative days is the deliverable.

Two things that do not work

Same-day deposit timing games.Depositing cash at 4pm to cover a debit that posts overnight depends entirely on your bank's cutoff and posting order, and it fails intermittently. It also produces a deposit pattern that looks reactive. Find out your bank's cutoff, then stop relying on it.

Moving money in from a personal account to cover the dip.It works mechanically and it costs you elsewhere. Owner contributions appear as deposits, get stripped out of revenue by any competent analyst, and if they are frequent they demonstrate that the business does not fund itself. A one-off capital injection recorded properly as equity is fine. A pattern of eleven transfers in from a personal account in three months is its own finding.

What to do with the months that are already bad

You cannot delete them. What you can do is make sure the good months are the recent ones, because most packages are three to six months and the window moves. A business that fixes this in the first quarter has a clean submission window by the start of the third.

And write the explanation for the bad period before anyone asks. One paragraph: what caused it, what changed, and the date it changed. A specific cause with a specific fix and a date that matches the statements is treated very differently from silence, because the alternative explanation an underwriter reaches for is that nothing was fixed and the clean months are luck.