Revenue-based financing: how retailers fund inventory without freezing cash

Is revenue-based financing better than a bank loan?

It depends entirely on what you’re buying. If you’re funding something structural – a warehouse, machinery, a hire that pays back over five years – a bank loan is the right instrument, and it’ll be cheaper. Revenue-based financing is built for the short cycle: buy the stock, sell it, repay as it sells. It’s assessed on your trading rather than years of accounts, the money arrives in days rather than weeks, and it doesn’t need to sit on your balance sheet as debt at all. The honest version is that you’re paying for speed and certainty, and whether that’s worth it depends on what the delay would cost you.

What happens to repayments if my sales slow down?

Repayments are taken as a percentage of the sales you process, so when daily revenue drops, the amount you repay drops with it. There’s no fixed instalment to find during a quiet week.

It’s worth being clear about where that flexibility ends, because this is the part businesses most often miss. Every advance comes with an expected repayment period, agreed before you accept it. Within that window your sales can rise and fall, and your repayments move with them. What doesn’t move is the end date. The advance still needs to be repaid in full by then, so if trading slows to the point where that looks unlikely, talk to us early rather than late.  

How quickly can I get the money?

If you’re eligible, the offer is already in your Mollie dashboard. There’s no application to fill in and, for most businesses, no paperwork to dig out. Accept it, and the funds can be in your account within minutes. Larger amounts need a little more information and a conversation with our team, but you’re still looking at days rather than the weeks a bank would take. That gap is usually the whole point: stock deals tend to expire long before a credit committee meets.

Is there interest, or any fee I won’t see coming?

No. You agree one fixed fee before you accept anything, and that’s the number. No compounding interest, no arrangement fee, no early repayment penalty, no charge that appears in month four. The reason we do it this way is that a percentage rate makes the real cost genuinely hard to work out in advance; you only know what a loan costs you once it’s finished. Here you know before you start. You can check out our help article to learn more. 

Will this affect my credit score or put my personal assets at risk?

No personal guarantee, and no charge over your home or savings. Eligibility is assessed on your Mollie payment history: what you actually process, and how consistently, rather than on a personal credit file. For most businesses, there’s no credit search at all, though for some amounts and markets we'll run a background check, which almost never requires anything from you.