Elevation Capital Review

Founded in 2010, Elevation Capital LLC provides several types of alternative funding options for small businesses, including:

• MCAs
• Factoring and accounts receivable financing
• Inventory and purchase order processing

To support its financing products, Elevation Capital also offers payment-processing services.

Elevation Capital works with business owners who have low credit scores, provided they generate sufficient revenue, providing financing quickly. However, the lender doesn’t disclose its rates on its website.

Consider Elevation Capital if you:

• Need up to $5,000,000 for MCAs or $10,000,000 for factoring
• Don’t qualify for conventional financing at lower rates
• Need funding quickly

MCAs are Elevation Capital’s core financing product. You receive an advance of up to $5,000,000 based on the strength of your sales projections. You repay the advance through automatic deductions from your future credit-card sales. This allows Elevation to extend financing to small businesses with healthy sales revenue even if the owner has a low credit score, as upcoming sales will cover financing repayments.

Whereas conventional bank loans calculate repayments using interest rates, Elevation Capital charges a fixed percentage from your future sales, a method known as factor rates. With factor rates, you repay the amount of your advance plus a fixed multiplier of the borrowed amount, which can be expressed as a percentage (for instance, 1.5 would be equivalent to 50%).

Elevation’s website doesn’t disclose the lender’s terms of factor rates. As a general rule in the financing industry, MCA factor rates tend to translate into higher costs than interest rates for conventional loans.

• Keep in Mind

  Because Elevation Capital’s MCA factor rates apply to your future sales, the amount you pay at a given time will vary with your sales volume. This can affect your cash flow, so you should do a cash-flow projection of the potential impact on your budget before accepting this type of offer.

Another financing option Elevation Capital offers is factoring, an asset-based lending procedure in which you sell your unpaid invoices at a discount in return for funding to help cover daily expenses. The buyer then collects the unpaid payments from your customers and sends you the money, minus a percentage. Effectively, you are exchanging a percentage of the money you have coming from your customers in return for being able to use the capital immediately before it gets collected.

This type of arrangement can work for industries which accept credit payments that don’t get collected immediately, including:

• Restaurants
• Retailers
• Health salons
• Medical
• Automotive

Elevation Capital’s minimum for factoring is $5,000 monthly to a maximum of $10,000,000 for larger companies. The lender doesn’t disclose factor rates on its website.

As with Elevation Capital’s MCAs, the amount you pay at a given time will depend on how much you have coming in from your accounts receivable, so the effect on your cash flow can fluctuate.

Elevation Capital also provides inventory and purchase-order financing. Inventory financing arrangements lend you money using your inventory as collateral. It works similar to a short-term loan or revolving line of credit. Purchase-order financing provides funding to buy inventory to complete customer orders. After you receive an order, your lender pays your supplier to manufacture your product and ship it to your customer, then collects the money from the customer and sends it to you, minus a percentage.

Inventory and purchase-order financing can work for companies that have seasonal inventory fluctuations, or who have orders coming in but lack the cash flow to fulfill them. For instance, a new business may receive a large volume of orders but lacks sufficient capital to handle them.

Elevation Capital’s website doesn’t disclose information about its amounts, terms or rates.

To complement its financing products, Elevation Capital offers payment processing services for small businesses. This allows companies to accept credit or debit card payments. Elevation payment processing services allow businesses to accept:

• Visa
• MasterCard
• American Express
• Discover

Elevation’s payment processing solutions accommodate all payment methods:

• Brick-and-mortar transactions
• E-commerce purchases
• Mobile payments

Elevation’s site doesn’t disclose the payment rates associated with its payment processing solutions.

The Elevation Capital application process involves 3 steps:

• First, you fill out an online form providing basic contact information, the amount of your financing request and your 4 most recent consecutive bank statements
• After submitting the form, you will receive a call from a funding specialist to review your financing options
• If you are approved, you can receive your funds in as little as 24 hours

• Multiple financing options as alternatives to traditional loans
• Large funding amounts available, up to $5,000,000 for merchant cash advances and $10,000,000 for factoring
• Willingness to work with business owners who have low credit scores
• Easy application process with minimal paperwork
• Fast approval process

One drawback is the lack of information about rates, terms, fees and other details on Elevation Capital’s website. Factor rates for MCAs tend to be higher than conventional loans as a rule of thumb. Before accepting an offer from Elevation Capital, consider comparing the company’s rates with other options to see if lower rates are available.

Another issue: The types of financing options Elevation Capital offers by their nature require you to pay a percentage of your future credit sales, past accounts receivable or current orders. This may cut into your cash flow. Make sure you have reviewed your cash-flow projections to check if you can afford to keep up with the repayment terms. Otherwise, you may be defeating the purpose of financing your business by taking on more debt than you can manage.

Elevation Capital’s website doesn’t disclose the requirements to receive funding, but it does indicate that the approval process focuses on the applicant’s cash flow.

Third-party reviewers report that Elevation Capital doesn’t have a minimum credit score requirement, in contrast to most lenders.

Elevation Capital Application: What You Need to Apply

To apply for Elevation Capital financing, you must submit:

• 4 of your company’s most recent consecutive bank statements, which must be uploaded to the site
• An e-signature

Elevation Capital doesn’t require:

• Tax returns
• Collateral

Elevation Capital’s alternative financing options may seem appealing if:

• You’re expecting money coming in from credit-card sales, accounts receivable or inventory sales
• Your credit rating is too low to qualify for conventional loans or if you need funds fast

Make sure you compare their rates with other options before accepting an offer. If you have a high credit score, you may find less expensive options elsewhere.

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