I won an order I cannot afford to fulfil

A confirmed order that cannot be fulfilled is a growth problem wearing the costume of a cash problem. The demand is real and evidenced, which makes it financeable — but the financing carries fulfilment risk as well as payment risk, and that is reflected in what it costs.

The critical arithmetic is margin. Purchase order financing is priced above most structures because the provider is exposed to whether the goods are produced and accepted, not merely whether the customer pays. On a thin-margin order the cost can consume most of the profit, which is how businesses grow revenue and lose money simultaneously.

More than one structure can usually solve the same presenting problem, and they are not equivalent. The differences that matter are what the facility is secured against, how repayment is taken, and whether the cost is quoted as an annual rate or as a fee on the amount advanced.

Speed is often the deciding factor in situations like this one. The fastest published timeline across the providers below is 24 hours, though published timelines assume a complete file — the preparation time before submission is usually the larger part of the calendar, and it is the part a business controls.

Published criteria gate consideration rather than approval, and the constraints below are the ones that most often end the conversation before pricing matters at all. It is worth checking them first: an application that was never eligible costs weeks and leaves a footprint.

It is also worth naming the case where the answer is not to borrow. Financing a shortfall that recurs every month does not fix it, and a repayment schedule layered on top of an unresolved margin or collection problem generally makes the position worse rather than better. If the same gap has appeared three times, the gap is the problem.

Preparation is the part of this that a business fully controls, and it moves terms more than most owners expect. Providers price uncertainty: a file that answers the obvious questions before they are asked is underwritten faster and more favourably than one that arrives incomplete, even when the underlying business is identical.

The list below is the common core. Individual providers ask for more, and anything that looks inconsistent between documents should be explained up front rather than left to be discovered.

The comparison that decides this is not the published ranges above but your own numbers: what the funds are for, what repays them, what the business can carry through a bad month, and which criteria you currently clear. Published ranges narrow the field; they cannot pick from it.

That is the work Caplift's assessment does. It takes your financial and operating inputs, tests debt-service capacity, compares structures on a consistent basis rather than on headline rates, and produces a funding-readiness view plus a lender-facing summary. The first assessment is free. Caplift is software — it is not a lender, it does not approve or guarantee financing, and the decision stays with you and your advisors.