Behind on MCA payments: what to do in the first 72 hours

What being behind actually means, and why 72 hours matter

Start with what happened. A merchant cash advance is the purchase of your future receivables at a discount, not a loan, so there is no missed loan payment in the bank sense. An ACH pull your agreement authorized came back unpaid, or several did. What that means next is written in your contract, not in a statute. In many agreements a single returned debit starts a small sequence: a fee, a retry, a call from the funder. A string of returns, or an account that suddenly looks empty, commonly reads very differently.

The first 72 hours matter because that is when you still control the story. An owner who shows up early with bank statements and a plan tends to be treated as a workout; a file that goes quiet tends to get routed toward collections. None of that is automatic, but the window where a calm phone call can settle things is real, and it is early.

One boundary first. If your debits are clearing but leave nothing behind, you are strained, not behind, and the options ladder in what to do when daily payments are too high is written for you. This page is for the owner who has already missed pulls and needs a sequence, not a menu.

The first hours: find the agreement and read five things

You cannot triage a contract you have not read. Find the signed agreement: search your email for the funding date, check the funder's portal, or ask the broker who placed it. Then sit down with it and a pen. You are looking for five things:

• The reconciliation clause. Many agreements include a true-up provision that lets you ask for the daily or weekly pull to be adjusted to match your actual revenue. Note what documentation it requires and how notice must be given. If sales dropped, this is the most useful paragraph in the document.
• The definition of default. In many agreements the heavy triggers are not a bounced debit but acts like blocking the ACH, closing the account, or switching card processors without consent. Know which side of that line you are standing on.
• Cure language. Some agreements give a short window to fix a returned payment, or require the funder to give notice before remedies begin. Many give nothing. Whether you have days or hours depends entirely on your contract.
• The personal guarantee. Many MCA guarantees are performance guaranties, commonly aimed at bad-faith acts such as diverting receivables or shutting the business to dodge the agreement, not at a slow month on its own. Wording varies from funder to funder, though, and some are written far more broadly. Read what yours actually says.
• A confession of judgment. A COJ matters only if your agreement contains one and only where courts will enforce it: New York now bars them against businesses that were not based there at signing, states such as Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Virginia still enforce them in commercial contracts, and New Jersey and Vermont have banned them for business financing. Our guide to confessions of judgment in MCA agreements explains how they work. If you signed one, everything on this page becomes more urgent.

Still today: stabilize the account, without touching the ACH

The instinct when debits start bouncing is to protect the account: block the pulls, move the money, open a fresh account. Do not. In many agreements those are precisely the acts that convert a missed payment into a breach, and they are the classic ways a personal guarantee stops being theoretical. Our guide on what happens in an MCA default walks through the machinery you would be starting.

Stabilizing means knowing your numbers, not hiding your money. List every position you carry and what it pulls, then map the next five business days: which debits are scheduled, which will clear, and what deposits are actually coming. Each daily position pulls about 21 times a month, so a stack of three can mean three separate hits tomorrow morning. Put the shortfall in dollars on paper.

If you can cover the next pull, cover it. Every debit that clears while you organize keeps you in the strongest posture: the owner whose sales dipped but who kept remitting, not the owner who went dark. If you cannot, that gap is what the phone call below is for. The point of today is to know the number before you dial.

Still today: document the drop and decide who calls

Every good outcome from here runs on evidence. Reconciliation clauses commonly require documentation, workout conversations go better with numbers than with apologies, and if a dispute ever reaches a courtroom, courts have expected merchants to show they actually used the contract's process rather than claiming afterward that it was fake. A dated paper trail is cheap insurance.

Pull the file together while it is fresh: the last three to six months of bank statements, your card-processing statements, and anything that shows what changed and when. A road closure, a lost anchor client, an equipment failure. Then write the one-paragraph version: what changed, when, what deposits look like now, and what you realistically expect over the next 90 days. Three or four sentences with numbers, not a hardship essay.

Last decision of the day: who makes contact. If you carry one or two positions and no legal notices have arrived, the owner calling directly, calm and documented, is commonly the fastest path. If you are several positions deep, or anything has arrived from a court or a law office, get advice before you negotiate.

Within 72 hours: call the funder before they call you

Order matters. Funders commonly prefer being repaid on an adjusted schedule over paying lawyers to chase a judgment, but they triage by behavior: the merchant who calls first with statements in hand looks like a workout, the merchant who dodges calls looks like a flight risk. Not every funder is reasonable, and nothing obligates them to bend. Silence, though, never improves a file.

Keep the call simple. Say what happened and when, with the numbers from your one-paragraph summary. Say what you can actually sustain per day or per week right now. Then ask what they can do: a reconciliation adjustment, a temporarily reduced remittance, a move from daily to weekly pulls if the agreement allows it. Do not promise a number you cannot hold for 60 days, because a broken workout is worse than none.

Treat every call like it will be quoted back to you: note the date and the name, and confirm anything agreed by email the same day. If a change is not in writing, it does not exist. Keep remitting whatever is actually agreed while the paperwork catches up. The fastest way to lose a workout is to miss the first payment under it.

If sales genuinely dropped: put the reconciliation request in writing

Reconciliation deserves its own step because it is the one lever built for exactly this situation. In many agreements the remittance was set as an estimate of a percentage of your revenue, and the true-up clause exists so the pull can be re-sized when reality diverges from the estimate. Using it is not asking for a favor. It is invoking a term of the contract.

Do it in writing, the way the clause says. Send the request to the notice address the agreement specifies, attach the statements, state your prior average revenue and your current actual revenue, and ask for the pull to be adjusted to match actual receipts under the provision. Ask for written confirmation of the new amount and its start date. Keep every reply, and if the funder ignores or refuses the clause they drafted, keep that record too. It will matter later if an attorney gets involved.

Two honest caveats. Reconciliation changes the pace of repayment, not the amount you owe, so treat it as a bridge rather than a fix. And it only fits if revenue genuinely fell. If your deposits are steady and the real problem is that three positions are pulling at once, reconciliation is the wrong tool, and the next step is the right one.

Within 72 hours: get payoff figures and line up the restructuring conversation

While you are talking to funders anyway, ask each one for a payoff letter: the exact figure, in writing, to retire the position today. Funders produce these routinely, and our guide to MCA payoff letters covers what a clean one includes; the payoff calculator can estimate the numbers while you wait.

Get it all on one page: every position, its remaining balance, its daily or weekly pull, and its payoff figure. That single page is the starting point for any honest restructuring conversation, and having it ready is what separates a 72-hour recovery from a 72-day slide.

Two structures are built for this spot. A traditional consolidation rolls multiple positions into one facility with a single smaller payment, commonly in about 3 to 10 business days. A reverse consolidation deposits funds on a schedule that offsets the existing debits so less leaves the account each day, commonly in about 3 to 7 business days. Both carry the same honest trade-off: lower payment, more breathing room, not necessarily less total cost, because a longer term can leave the total repaid the same or more.

Being a few days behind does not automatically disqualify you from either. Deep, months-long default is another matter, which is why this page is about the first 72 hours and not the first 72 days.

What not to do in the first 72 hours

Most of the worst MCA outcomes trace back to a panic move made in the first few days, not to the missed payment itself. The list is short. Hold it firmly:

• Do not block the ACH or issue a stop-payment order. You authorized those debits in a signed agreement. In many contracts, cutting them off is itself an event of default that can accelerate the full balance and put the personal guarantee in play.
• Do not quietly open a new account and move your deposits, and do not switch card processors without consent. Agreements commonly name diverting receivables as a breach, and it is the kind of act that reads as bad faith everywhere it matters.
• Do not take a new position to cover the old ones. A fourth advance to feed the third adds another daily pull to the exact pile that caused the misses, minus fees. If deposits could not carry three positions, they cannot carry four.
• Do not stop paying because someone promised to negotiate for you. Some debt-relief operations open by telling you to halt all remittances and pay them instead, to create leverage. A manufactured default is still a default, and the acceleration, guarantee exposure, and judgment risk land on you, not on the firm that suggested it. There are legitimate ways to reduce or stop the debits; this is not one of them.
• Do not dodge the funder's calls. Every ignored contact nudges the file from workout toward enforcement.
• Do not sign anything new in a panic. No modification, settlement, or fresh agreement deserves less scrutiny than you now wish you had given the first contract.

When a lawyer is the right call, and where hour 72 should leave you

Everything here is general information, not legal advice, and there is a line past which a broker is not the right help. Cross any of these and talk to a qualified attorney, ideally one who handles merchant cash advance cases, before you negotiate or sign anything: you have been served with a lawsuit, a judgment has been entered against you, a confession of judgment has been filed, your bank account has been frozen, or a funder has started contacting your customers or your processor to redirect payments. Each of those deserves counsel who has read your actual agreement. Our guide on attorneys versus brokers lays out who does what.

Short of that line, this is a cash-flow and structure problem, and 72 hours is enough time to get on top of it. Done right, hour 72 looks like this: agreement read, account stable and untouched, revenue drop documented, funder contacted before they contacted you, reconciliation requested in writing if sales fell, payoff figures in hand, and a restructuring review booked.

A relief and consolidation review starts with the one-page stack summary you just built, takes about two minutes, and there is no credit pull to start. Everything discussed is an estimate, actual terms vary by underwriting, and nothing is an offer of credit. We are a funding broker, not a lender and not a law firm, so a specialist can run your numbers and tell you plainly what is realistic. Call or text 866-625-4413, Monday to Friday, 8a to 7p ET. The plan above is boring on purpose. Boring is what gets a business through this week.