How much can my business actually borrow?
Why the number comes from your deposits rather than your revenue, and the four things that move it up or down.
September 8, 2026 · 3 min read
The most common question we get is also the one with the least satisfying answer on a website: it depends on your deposits. Not your revenue, not your projections, and not what a competitor quoted you last month.
Here is how the number is actually arrived at, so you can estimate it yourself before you apply.
It starts with deposits, not revenue
Revenue is what you invoiced. Deposits are what landed. Underwriting works from deposits because that is the money that will be there when a payment is due.
A useful starting point: most offers land between 80% and 130% of one month of average deposits, read across the last six months. A business averaging $90,000 a month in deposits is usually looking at somewhere between $72,000 and $117,000.
That is a range, not a quote. Four things move you inside it.
What moves the number up
Consistency. Six months that each look like the others is worth more than six months averaging the same amount with two of them near zero. Steady beats large.
Deposit count. Forty deposits a month from forty customers is a stronger file than two deposits from two customers, at the same total. Concentration is the risk nobody thinks to mention.
Time in business. Two years of history tells us more than seven months of it. There is no cliff, but there is a slope.
Headroom. What you are already paying out weekly to other funders comes off the top. This is the single biggest cause of an offer coming in lower than expected.
What moves it down
Negative days. NSF fees. A declining trend across the six months rather than a flat or rising one. A large one-off deposit that inflates the average and is obviously not repeatable — we strip those out, and so should you when you estimate.
The honest version
A person reads the statements. That is not a marketing line; it is why the range above is a range. Two businesses with identical averages can get different offers because one of them has a story the numbers alone do not tell — a seasonal dip that repeats every year, a single large customer who has been there a decade.
If you want the real number rather than the range, the fastest route is six months of statements and a phone call. Both take less time than reading about it.