Merchant cash advance·8 min read·Updated 7 September 2026

A £10,000 merchant cash advance: one month of card takings, bought forward

By the CapExpand team

Reviewed by Alex Beardsley, Founder · UK commercial finance broker

Facts checked 7 September 2026 · first published 7 September 2026

365 Finance sets its minimum advance at £10,000 and its minimum card turnover at £10,000 a month. Put those two published numbers together and the smallest deal it will write is almost exactly one month of a merchant's card takings, bought forward. That is a neat way to understand what this product is at the bottom of the market. You are selling next month's terminal receipts at a discount and paying for them out of the following eight or nine months.

Not every lender draws the line there. Liberis will fund from £1,000 through its direct route, and its Starter Capital product is built for merchants with no transaction history at all, up to £50,000. YouLend publishes no minimum on its own site. The practical floor for most terminals is somewhere between £2,500 and £10,000 a month of card sales, which is the range the partner channels quote.

What a lender needs to see at £10,000

Card volume, not credit history, is the gate. 365 Finance publishes the clearest criteria: trading for at least six months, with average credit and debit card sales of at least £10,000 a month. It runs a soft search rather than a full credit check for a provisional quote, and asks for twelve months of card statements on its unsecured page. Its published approval rate is over 90%, which is what happens when the test is a terminal report rather than a balance sheet.

Liberis sets a lower bar through its partner channels. On the Opayo route it asks for more than four months of taking card payments and more than £2,500 a month. Elavon frames the same test as at least ten credit and debit card transactions averaging £2,500 a month, ideally after four months trading with Elavon, or twelve months of evidence if you have switched processor. Dojo's Flex Funds page quotes £1,000 of monthly card revenue and four months of trading, though the press release announcing the same product said £60,000 of annual revenue and twelve months, so treat the lower figure as the marketing version.

Two things do get checked even at this size. Liberis asks for a personal guarantee if you apply as a limited company or an LLP, and it runs company and consumer bureau searches that leave a record other finance providers can see. YouLend's route through Dojo is described on Dojo's own page as a soft search. If you are likely to apply elsewhere in the next few months, the order in which you approach lenders is worth thinking about.

Worked example

Worked example · Illustrative advance on published market terms

£10,000 for a two-chair salon replacing its backwash units

Assumptions (illustrative, not a quote)

Advance £10,000, taken eight months into trading
Factor rate 1.28, inside the 1.10 to 1.50 range seen in the UK market; established businesses tend to sit at 1.10 to 1.25 and a young salon at a small size will not
Repayment 12% of card sales, inside the 5% to 15% band 365 Finance publishes
Card sales £12,000 a month, about £400 a day across a seven-day week
Illustration only. No lender on this page publishes a rate card, and every figure is subject to its own underwriting

The arithmetic

Total repayable = £10,000 × 1.28 = £12,800, so the fee is £2,800 and it never changes
Monthly collection = 12% of £12,000 = £1,440
£12,800 ÷ £1,440 = 8.9 months to clear
On a daily view: £400 a day × 12% = £48 a day, and £12,800 ÷ £48 = 267 trading days
A quiet month at £8,000 of card sales collects £960 instead of £1,440, a £480 shortfall that pushes the finish out by about ten days. The £2,800 fee does not move

The fee is fixed and the finish line moves. That is the trade in one sentence. If you want to compare it with a loan, work out what £2,800 costs over the 8.9 months you actually held the money, not over a year.

Who funds £10,000

Lender	Published range	At £10,000
365 Finance	£10,000 to £500,000	Exactly on its floor, and its £10,000 monthly card turnover requirement means the advance equals about one month of takings. Repayment published as typically 5% to 15% of card sales, typically cleared in 5 to 10 months.
Liberis	£1,000 to £1,000,000 (direct)	One of the few that will genuinely write a four-figure advance. The Opayo partner channel quotes £2,500 to £300,000 instead, so the number you see depends on which door you come through.
Liberis Starter Capital	Up to £50,000	Built for merchants with no transaction history, with eligibility from £0 a month. This is the product behind Dojo Flex Funds, which quotes a 90% approval rate and funding from week one.
YouLend	Up to £2,000,000; no published minimum	Nothing on youlend.com sets a floor. Third-party reviews put it around £3,000 on its own application page and as low as £500 through eBay, so £10,000 is comfortably inside but you will usually meet it inside a platform.
Nucleus revenue-based loan	£3,000 to £300,000	Sized at up to 200% of monthly revenue over 3 to 12 months, repaid by fixed weekly direct debit rather than a percentage of card sales. Four months trading and at least ten transactions a month.
Capify	Up to £500,000 (broker channel)	Capify’s direct merchant cash advance pages now return an error or redirect, but its broker page still describes an advance repaid from a percentage of daily card payments. Treat it as a route that exists through an introducer rather than a product you can find on its own site.

Examples from the panel, not the full list, from each lender’s published criteria as at 7 September 2026. Minimum advance figures are the hardest thing to verify in this market because several lenders publish none. Every figure is subject to the lender’s own checks.

What a factor rate of 1.28 is actually charging

A factor rate is not an interest rate and it is not an APR. Multiply the advance by it and you have the total repayable, full stop. At 1.28 on £10,000 you owe £12,800 from the moment the money lands, whether you clear it in six months or fourteen. Nothing accrues, nothing compounds, and nothing is rebated if you finish early.

That last point is the one that costs people money. On a loan, paying early saves interest. Fleximize recalculates and says early repayers save an average of 44% of their interest. On an advance the fee is already fixed, so finishing in five months instead of nine means the same £2,800 spread over half the time, which makes the effective annual cost roughly double. Speed helps a lender's return, not yours.

The honest way to read £2,800 on £10,000 over 8.9 months is to convert it. Flat, that is 28% for three-quarters of a year, so about 38% a year on the original sum, and because you are repaying throughout, the like-for-like annual figure on the balance you actually owe is roughly double again. Our factor rate against APR page does the conversion properly. None of that makes an advance the wrong product, but it should be compared with a twelve-month loan at 30% or 40%, not with a mortgage.

The 3% floor that turns a flexible advance into a fixed one

Liberis publishes a clause that most merchants only meet later. There is a minimum monthly amount of up to 3% of the receivables it purchased, and its explore-funding footnote adds that any shortfall may be collected by direct debit. The Opayo terms state it as a flat 3% with no “up to”. So the advance flexes downwards only so far, and then stops flexing.

Work it through on the salon. The total repayable is £12,800, so a 3% monthly minimum is £384. At normal trading the 12% sweep collects £1,440 a month, nowhere near the floor. But if card sales fell to £3,000 in a bad month, 12% collects £360, which is below £384, and the £24 difference could be taken by direct debit. At £10,000 the floor is small in cash terms. The reason to know about it is that it turns the product's central promise, that you only pay when you sell, into a promise with a limit.

Liberis attaches two more conditions worth reading before signing. Worldpay's Liberis FAQ says that if you cease trading for more than seven days without telling Liberis, the collections team may contact you. It also confirms a right to change your mind within fourteen days of receiving the funding at no charge, which is a genuinely useful safety valve and one very few lenders in this market offer.

Where £10,000 advances actually come from

Most merchants at this size never apply to a cash advance lender directly. They see an offer inside something they already use. Dojo's core business funding is YouLend, and Dojo launched a second product, Flex Funds, with Liberis in February 2026. Amazon's UK cash advance and its Flexible Financing Line are YouLend. eBay Seller Capital uses both YouLend and Liberis, with Liberis's Flexible Growth Financing launching there in April 2026. Deliveroo Capital, Lopay, Barclaycard, Teya and Worldline all sit somewhere on the same map.

The advantage of the embedded route is real. The platform already holds your sales history, so the decision is fast and the underwriting is light. Liberis says 70% of merchants were funded within one working day of approval in 2025, and one in five deals completes within four hours. YouLend quotes approval in as little as 24 hours and funds in as little as 48 hours after that.

The disadvantage is that you see one offer. A merchant who takes the number in the Dojo dashboard has no idea whether the same terminal report would produce a cheaper advance somewhere else, or whether a twelve-month loan at a published rate would cost less than a factor rate nobody prints. That is the gap we exist to fill, and it is widest at small advance sizes where the pricing spread is widest.

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Frequently asked questions

Liberis publishes a direct range starting at £1,000, which is the lowest genuine floor we can source. 365 Finance starts at £10,000 and will not go below it. YouLend publishes no minimum at all on its own site, although third-party reviews put its own application page at around £3,000 and its eBay route as low as £500.

About £10,000 a month if you go to 365 Finance, because that is its published minimum and it is the same figure as the advance. Liberis through Opayo asks for more than £2,500 a month over four months of card trading, so a £10,000 advance would be roughly four months of takings there, which is at the high end of what most lenders will forward.

Liberis says it will ask for personal guarantees if you apply as a limited company or a limited liability partnership. YouLend does not publish its guarantee wording anywhere public. 365 Finance discusses personal guarantees on its unsecured page without stating the scope. Assume one is required and read the actual wording before signing.

365 Finance publishes a typical payoff of five to ten months on its cash advance page, and six to ten on its unsecured page. Our worked example lands at 8.9 months at a 12% sweep. Dojo’s page for the YouLend product describes typical repayment of nine months with a maximum of one year, and Lopay says many advances are expected to clear within six to nine months.

It can complicate it. YouLend operates a settlement account under its FCA payment institution licence, and using that account is a condition of the financing, so the card processor routes takings through it. Changing processor mid-advance is a conversation with the lender rather than a form you fill in. Liberis works through the processor relationship in a similar way on its partner channels.

Almost never on total cost, but that is not always the question. Our example puts a £2,800 fee against a £2,294 interest cost on a twelve-month loan at iwoca’s representative rate, so the advance is dearer. What it buys is a payment that shrinks when trade does, no fixed monthly figure to miss, and a decision made on a terminal report rather than filed accounts.

Liberis allows a renewal on its Working Capital product once you are 50% paid down. Nucleus says its revenue-based loan can sit on top of an existing merchant cash advance rather than replacing it. Capify takes the opposite line and will only refinance a competitor once that facility is more than half repaid, paying the other lender out rather than stacking behind them.

Sources and method

Lender ranges were checked against the sources below on 7 September 2026. Panel counts come from our September 2026 lender-platform extract, available products only.