The Fundworks Review

The Fundworks is a merchant cash advance provider that offers relatively affordable and transparent merchant cash advances (MCAs) to small businesses. While MCAs are more expensive than traditional business loans, they can be one of the only options for businesses that don’t have the best credit or longest business history. 

One important thing to know about The Fundworks, though, is they will require you to sign a confession of judgment for advances of $40,000 or more. This is not in the best interest for you, the borrower, as—in the event that you default on the loan—it lets The Fundworks obtain a judgment against you, without notifying you or following usual court procedures.

While The Fundworks only requires a personal credit score of 500 for most of their applicants, this may vary depending on your industry. For instance, they require a FICO score of at least 600 for transportation businesses and at least 620 for auto dealerships.

Additionally, The Fundworks is only willing to work with businesses that have less than five non-sufficient funds (NSFs) for two consecutive months and less than eight in the month in which they’re applying. 

Lastly, The Fundworks requires that borrowers have more than four monthly deposits in their business bank account.

• Three months of statements for all business accounts
• Copy of your driver’s license
• Voided business check
• Proof of ownership
• Landlord contact information

Now, let’s take a closer look at The Fundworks’ application, underwriting, and post-funding processes.

To initiate the underwriting process with The Fundworks, you’ll need to download and fill out their online application. This application will ask you for some pretty detailed information about yourself and your business. The required information for The Fundworks’ application will include—but won’t necessarily be limited to—the following stats:

• Legal entity type
• Date you began doing business
• Tax ID number
• Months left on your lease (if applicable)
• Landlord contact information (if applicable)
• Details on any current business debt
• Gross annual sales
• Sales of most recent month
• Bank deposit amounts for three most recent months
• Percentage of ownership

Compared to other short-term financing providers’ applications, this initial application is remarkably thorough. That said, most financing companies will require this information at some point in the underwriting process—The Fundworks just gets it out of the way at the beginning. Once you’ve completed and signed this application, you’ll submit it along with the three most recent monthly statements from all of your business accounts.

Unlike many other merchant cash advance providers, The Fundworks doesn’t provide any soft approvals—which are often one of the biggest headaches that business owners come across in the funding process.

If the information you submit in this preliminary application looks promising to The Fundworks, you’ll need to submit additional paperwork to confirm and verify your identity and your business credentials. In your last steps before funding, you’ll work directly with one of The Fundworks’ final underwriters.

When all is said and done, if The Fundworks approves you for a merchant cash advance, they can often fund you as quickly as the same day that you applied, especially if you’re able to get your necessary documents together quickly.

Once you fund with The Fundworks, you’ll repay your debt as you would with any other merchant cash advance product. The Fundworks will take repayments in the form of a daily percentage of your business’s revenues, and will set up these daily percentages so that your debt will be repaid within 180 days.

Be sure to note that—if you fund with more than $40,000—your loan agreement with The Fundworks will include a confession of judgment. This is like an extreme version of a personal guarantee, so be especially vigilant to keep on schedule with your payments.

Generally speaking, The Fundworks will evaluate your business’s renewal eligibility at their discretion. However, borrowers will typically be eligible to renew their merchant cash advances from The Fundworks once they’ve successfully paid down 40% of their initial debt.

The Fundworks is based in Van Nuys, California, and is available via phone or email from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m PT Monday through Friday.  

They also have a separate process specifically to manage customer complaints. You can email or submit a written complaint to The Fundworks offices, which they will review and then provide a written response.

There aren’t many The Fundworks reviews from customers to be found online. On The Fundworks’ BBB profile, there is only one review and two customer complaints—both of which have been addressed by the company. One complaint was about not being able to get into contact with anyone to resolve an issue with their account, while the other was from a customer who had successfully funded with them once but was disappointed that they were not offered a loan renewal after the first was paid off. 

This lack of customer reviews could be due to the fact that The Fundworks offers their own complaints submission process. Since they handle these issues internally, there are then fewer public reviews to sift through.

The Fundworks is not in Fundera’s Lender Network. The Fundera team carefully vets all of the lenders in our network, and have determined that The Fundworks either doesn’t have the technology to work with Fundera or does not offer a financing product that competes with the other lenders in its product class. We suggest considering another lender in this product class.

See if you qualify for similar products in Fundera’s Lender Network.