How to choose an MCA CRM

A generic CRM tracks contacts and a sales pipeline. A merchant cash advance shop needs more than that, because one deal touches a merchant, one or more owners, months of bank statements, several lenders, several offers, a funded advance, a commission and, months later, a renewal. If those objects are not first-class in the software, your team rebuilds them in spreadsheets and email folders.

At minimum, an MCA CRM should hold these records and connect them:

• Leads from every source you buy or generate, with the source kept for reporting.
• Merchants and owners, with sensitive fields (SSN, EIN, bank numbers) encrypted and masked.
• Deals with a pipeline that matches how your shop works, plus documents and stips.
• Bank statement figures: deposits, average daily balance, NSFs, negative days and existing positions.
• Lenders and their criteria, so you know who will look at a deal before you send it.
• Submissions and offers, one row per lender, with status, decline reasons and the offer math.
• Funded deals, commissions and renewals, so you get paid what you are owed and call the merchant back at the right time.

Most demos look the same for the first ten minutes. These are the areas where products actually differ, roughly in the order they affect revenue.

1. Submission tracking. Can you send one deal to several lenders and see each lender's status, stip requests, decline reason and offer in one place? This is where deals stall.
2. Lender criteria and matching. Can you store each lender's box (revenue, time in business, credit, positions, industries, states) and see which lenders a deal qualifies for, with the reason? See how lender matching works.
3. Offer math you can trust. Payback, net funding, payment, term, holdback and your commission should be calculated the same way every time and stored with the offer.
4. Commissions and clawbacks. Expected versus received, splits to reps and partners, and a way to check a lender's commission statement against what you expected.
5. Renewals. A list of merchants who have reached a lender's paid-in percentage, so renewals do not go direct to the lender.
6. Import and export. How your current data gets in, and whether you can get all of it out again as CSV.
7. Permissions and audit. Agents limited to their own deals if you want that, masked PII, and a log of who revealed or exported what.
8. Speed and mobile. Closers work from their phones. Every screen should load fast and work at phone width.

Ask these on the call and ask for the answer in writing. A vendor that cannot answer plainly is telling you something.

• What is the full price per user per month, and what is the setup or implementation fee?
• Is there a minimum number of seats or a minimum contract length?
• Which modules cost extra (servicing, syndication, e-sign, texting, statement parsing)?
• Do you charge for configuration changes after go-live?
• How do I get my data in, and who does the mapping? How do I get all of it out?
• Can I store lender criteria and see why a deal does or does not match a lender?
• How are offers calculated? Can I set business days per month per lender?
• Can I reconcile a lender's commission statement against expected commissions?
• Which features in this demo are live today, and which are on the roadmap?
• Where is my data stored, which fields are encrypted, and is there an audit log?

Weight each area by how much it matters to your shop, score each vendor from 1 to 5 after a trial, and multiply. The weights below suit a 3 to 10 person ISO that places mostly MCA; change them for your business.

Per-seat prices are only part of it. Add setup, minimum seats, paid modules and the admin time someone on your team spends configuring the system.

year-one cost = setup fee + (price per user x billable users x 12) + add-ons x 12
billable users = max(your users, seat minimum)

Legacy platforms in this market often charge a setup or implementation fee, set a minimum number of seats and price modules (servicing, syndication, e-sign, texting) separately. Each of those changes the real number. A worked example with illustrative figures, not any vendor's price list:

Run the same sum for every vendor you shortlist. For ours, the inputs are on the pricing page: published per-user prices, no setup fee during our introductory offer and no seat minimum. Introductory offer: $0 setup and free migration from your current CRM.

A dedicated tool is not always the right call. You are probably better served elsewhere if:

• You fund and service your own advances and need ACH debits, collections and syndication ledgers. Look at funder origination and servicing platforms instead.
• Your company already runs on an enterprise CRM platform with an admin team, and you want lending inside it. A package built on that platform will fit your stack better.
• You are one person placing a handful of deals a month. A spreadsheet and a good email folder may be enough until volume grows.
• You mostly originate residential mortgages. You need a regulated loan origination system, not an MCA CRM.

1. Day 1: import a real lead list and check how duplicates are handled.
2. Day 2: enter five of your real lenders with their criteria.
3. Day 3: work one live deal end to end: statements, matches, submission, offers.
4. Day 4: have a closer use it only from a phone for a day.
5. Day 5: mark a test deal funded and check commissions, splits and the renewal date.
6. Day 6: export everything as CSV and confirm nothing is missing.
7. Day 7: score it on the sheet above.

If you want to run this plan on ours, request access. For a closer look at the parts that matter most, see lender submissions and commission tracking.