MCA calculator: cost, consolidation, max advance, stacking burden
Four calculators for the numbers an MCA deal turns on — what an advance costs at a given factor rate and term, what consolidating positions really trades away, how much advance fits a merchant’s revenue, and where stacking burden lands. No signup, no email.
Estimates only — MetrikData reads the real numbers straight from the bank statement.
How the cost of an advance is calculated
An advance has three moving parts: the amount, the factor rate, and the term. Payback is the amount multiplied by the factor — $100,000 at 1.32 pays back $132,000, full stop. The daily debit is that payback divided by the number of payment days in the term. The cost never changes with time the way interest does; what the term changes is how hard the daily debit hits cash flow. A shorter term means the same payback compressed into fewer, larger debits — which is exactly why two deals with identical factor rates can sit very differently on a merchant’s statement.
The common trap is reading a factor rate as if it were an interest rate. 1.32 looks like 32%, but paid back over 120 daily debits it annualizes far higher. If the terminology is new, the MCA glossary covers factor rate, holdback, specified percentage, and the rest in plain language.
What consolidating positions actually trades
Consolidation takes the outstanding balances of existing positions and reprices them as one new advance — new factor, new (usually longer) term. The daily payment almost always drops, because the combined balance is spread over more days. The total cost almost always rises, because balances that were already partly paid down get a fresh factor applied to them. Neither side of that is hidden math; it’s the whole trade. The calculator puts the current combined daily debit next to the new one, and the added payback next to the relief, so the decision is made with both numbers visible.
How much advance fits a merchant’s revenue
Affordability runs backwards from revenue. Start with monthly true revenue — trade deposits, not gross inflow — apply a debt-service ceiling as a share of it, subtract the daily debits already leaving the account, and what remains is the daily payment a new advance can occupy. From there, the factor rate and term convert a supportable daily payment into a maximum advance amount. Every desk sets its own ceiling; the calculator makes the ceiling an input rather than an opinion.
The number this lives or dies on is “existing daily debt service” — and on a real deal that comes from the statement, not from what’s disclosed. Finding those debits is what MCA stacking detection does: every recurring position, typed by payment cadence, with the daily total computed from actual transactions.
Stacking burden: debt service against true revenue
Burden is the share of a merchant’s revenue already committed to financing debits — total daily debt service, monthlyized, divided by monthly true revenue. The denominator is what makes or breaks the metric: measure against gross deposits and the advances themselves inflate the revenue they’re being compared to, so a heavily stacked merchant can look moderately loaded. Measured against trade revenue with financing receipts, own-account transfers, and refunds excluded, the same statement tells a different story.
That financing-excluded burden is the exact metric MetrikData computes when it reads a statement — positions found and typed by cadence, daily debits summed from real transactions, revenue cleaned before the division. The calculator estimates it from your inputs; the statement read measures it.
Common questions
Is a factor rate the same as an interest rate?
No. A factor rate is a fixed multiplier: a $100,000 advance at a 1.30 factor pays back $130,000 regardless of how fast it’s repaid. Interest accrues over time; a factor cost doesn’t shrink if you repay early. Because MCA terms are short and debits are daily or weekly, the annualized cost of a factor rate is much higher than the same number would suggest as an interest rate.
What counts as true revenue in these calculators?
Money the business actually earns: trade deposits. It excludes financing receipts (advance deposits inflate the top line), transfers between the business’s own accounts, and refunds. Burden or affordability measured against gross deposits understates risk — which is why MetrikData computes burden against financing-excluded trade revenue when it reads a statement.
How accurate are these numbers?
They’re estimates — the math is exact, but the inputs are whatever you type in. A real underwriting read starts from the bank statement itself: actual debits, actual deposit cadence, actual positions. MetrikData produces those figures from an uploaded PDF, with every number traceable to the transactions behind it.
Does consolidating MCA positions save money?
It usually lowers the daily payment and raises the total cost — the combined balance is repriced at a new factor over a longer term. The consolidation calculator shows both sides of that trade so you can see the daily relief and the added payback next to each other.
Related
These are estimates — the statement has the real numbers
Upload a merchant statement and MetrikData computes positions, cadence, and burden from the actual transactions.