The Revenue You Actually Need to Survive It
A Daily MCA Payment

A daily debit becomes affordable only after the business pays for the revenue that supports it, and the revenue required is a matter of division rather than instinct. Divide the payment by the share of revenue the business can devote to it, and the quotient is the daily sales the account must produce before anything else is paid. The formula is one line. The assumption inside it carries the entire analysis.

That assumption, the sustainable share, is a business judgment about margins, fixed costs, and whatever obligations the bank record reveals, not a constant any dataset supplies. The tables below therefore work as a slider across four candidate shares, five, ten, and fifteen percent, with twenty percent for the wide margin file, applied to three common payment sizes. The reader selects the share that resembles the business and reads off the revenue it implies, or discovers that no honest share makes the payment fit.

The Formula and the Assumption It Carries

From the payment and the share comes the required daily revenue: the daily payment divided by the maximum sustainable share. A $500 debit at a ten percent share implies $5,000 in daily revenue, because 500 divided by 0.10 is 5,000, and the same division governs every cell that follows. The arithmetic needs no dataset and no defense. What needs defense is the share the owner selects, since a share chosen for comfort rather than derived from the margin converts the formula into permission. That structure matches one funder's account of revenue based financing with a fixed total payback, where the total is set and the schedule collects it.

Two cautions belong before the tables. First, stacked debits sum before the formula is applied: three daily payments of $500 are a single $1,500 obligation for this purpose, and testing each in isolation understates the burden by design. Second, revenue is not cash, and the margin between collections and keepable funds must be subtracted before any share is declared sustainable, a step the survey record supports without stating, since denied firms in the 2024 federal survey pointed to existing debt above any other explanation. Resist the urge to skip the subtraction.

A $500 Daily Payment

The smallest of the three sizes demands a serious book of business. At a twenty percent share, which only a wide margin business can defend, $500 implies $2,500 in daily revenue. At fifteen percent the implied revenue is $3,333. At ten it is $5,000. At five, a share appropriate to a thin margin operation with heavy fixed costs, the implied revenue is $10,000 each day, or roughly $300,000 a month behind a debit that looked modest on the offer page.

That last cell surprises owners more than any other in this article, though the division sat in plain view. A modest debit against a narrow margin behaves like a large debit, and the business that signed for $500 while collecting $4,000 daily at thin margins was insolvent on the schedule from the first morning, a condition the bank record will confirm to anyone who divides before signing.

A $1,000 Daily Payment

Double the debit and every revenue figure doubles with it, which is the humbling property of division: at twenty percent the implied daily revenue is $5,000, at fifteen it is $6,667, at ten it is $10,000, and at five it is $20,000. The ten percent row deserves attention because owners nominate it without calculation, as if a round number carried analytical weight (which industry marketing will call conservative), and $10,000 in daily collections means a business approaching $300,000 a month before the debit is survivable on that assumption.

Often overlooked in this row is the weekly aggregation, and the oversight costs more than the daily figure suggests. Seven debits of $1,000 remove $7,000 from the operating week (a sum the monthly view smooths into abstraction), and a business that tests affordability by month while paying by day has chosen the wrong lens for its own obligation. The week is the unit the account experiences. The month is the unit the offer implies.

A $2,500 Daily Payment

At the largest size the exercise changes character. At twenty percent, $2,500 implies $12,500 in daily revenue. At fifteen percent the figure is $16,667. At ten it is $25,000. At five it is $50,000 each day, a collection volume that describes a substantial enterprise rather than the typical borrower, and the distance between that volume and the actual book is the measure of the decision.

The $2,500 debit functions the way a second payroll functions in a firm that approved only one: technically present in the budget, operationally dominant over everything around it, drawing against each day's deposits in order to stand ahead of suppliers rather than among them, while suppliers wait behind it, reserves wait behind them, and the tax line lengthens by the week. Counsel who restructure these files (which is to say, counsel who divide the debit by the margin before the first conference call) start here, with the revenue the business collects rather than the revenue the advance assumed.

Why Stacked Payments Sum Before the Formula

Each position was underwritten alone. The account pays them as one. Two debits of $1,000 do not each consume ten percent of revenue; combined, they consume a share that must be combined and tested as a single $2,000 obligation. Each position was affordable alone. Together they are not. The formula works on the total or it does not work at all.

Test the sum.

Bringing the Math to a Settlement Company

Delancey Street, a settlement company, not a law firm, repeats in its intake the division this article performs, with the bank record supplying the revenue and the agreements supplying the debits. The firm will review and analyze the payment totals, the margins that support them, and the shares those two produce in combination, to ensure the strategy fits the business rather than the offer. Independent counsel handles the legal work and ensures that any release is recorded.

Simply bring the statements and every agreement behind the debits, even briefly held positions that closed before the current strain began. What the owner discloses, or withholds, at that first meeting determines whether the plan rests on fact. Whether any share fits the book is a question the margin answers, not the worksheet. Extremely narrow margins leave extremely little room for a daily debit, and the peculiar mercy of the formula is that it announces the verdict before the account does. That is the mercy and the warning. A first review of the numbers costs nothing and assumes nothing.