How much EFTPOS finance can your takings really handle?

The right size for an EFTPOS or revenue-based advance is the amount you can keep repaying in your quietest normal week, after rent, wages, super, suppliers and tax have all been paid. That number is often smaller than the offer. Providers work from your average card takings; your bills don’t care about averages.

This guide gives you a quick way to work out your own number before you talk to anyone, so you can compare offers on your terms.

How do providers decide what to offer?

Card-based providers look mainly at your takings. They export several months of terminal or gateway data, check it against your bank statements and look for:

• average daily and weekly card volume
• how consistent those takings are week to week
• how long you’ve been trading
• what’s already being collected by other providers
• your credit history and any tax debt

From that, they estimate what your sales could repay over a set period. That’s a reasonable way to judge risk from their side. It doesn’t account for the rent increase coming in March, the new casual you’ve just hired or the BAS due at the end of the month. Our page on revenue-based and EFTPOS finance explains the two common collection methods in more detail.

business.gov.au’s guide to applying for a business loan puts it simply: know “the maximum repayment you can afford” before you apply. For a card-based advance, that means a daily or weekly figure, worked out from your real cash flow.

What is the quiet-week test?

It’s a five-minute check you can do with your terminal reports and bank statements.

1. Find a quiet but normal week. Not a week you were closed, but the slowest week you’d expect in an ordinary month or season.
2. Write down that week’s card takings and any other banked income.
3. Subtract the week’s share of fixed costs: rent, wages, super, loan repayments, insurance, software and utilities.
4. Subtract average supplier payments for a week at that level of trade.
5. Set aside tax: a weekly share of GST and PAYG withholding you’ll owe on your next BAS.
6. What’s left is your weekly headroom. A comfortable advance collects well inside that figure, not right up to it.

If the proposed collection would use most or all of your headroom in a quiet week, the advance is too big, too short, or both.

Run the test twice if you can: once on a quiet week from the last few months and once on the same week a year ago. If the two numbers are very different, find out why before you sign. A new competitor down the street, a lost wholesale customer or a change in opening hours can all shift your baseline, and a provider sizing on recent averages won’t always pick that up.

It also helps to write the result down as a single sentence, such as “we can comfortably repay about $1k a week in a slow week”. That’s the figure to hold on to when an offer arrives, because it’s easy to be swayed by a bigger number on the screen.

What costs do owners forget to include?

Four regularly catch people out:

Often-forgotten cost	Why it matters for an advance
Super on every pay run	Under Payday Super, from 1 July 2026 employers pay super alongside wages, and contributions must reach the fund within 7 business days, according to the Fair Work Ombudsman. It’s now a weekly or fortnightly outflow, not a quarterly one
GST and PAYG withholding	Collected daily from customers and staff pay, but paid in a lump with your BAS. Quarterly BAS falls due on 28 October, 28 February, 28 April and 28 July, per the ATO’s due dates
Annual and irregular bills	Insurance renewals, registrations and licence fees arrive in lumps
Other daily collections	A second advance or equipment lease debiting the same account

If you’ve been running on quarterly super until recently, re-do your weekly cost figures. Many owners found the cash went out the door faster than their old spreadsheet assumed once the new rules began.

Does the collection method change the answer?

Yes, quite a lot.

Share-of-sales collections shrink in a slow week and grow in a busy one. That’s forgiving. But the provider’s share comes out before you see the money, so your margin after that share still has to cover your costs. On thin-margin days it can feel tighter than the headline number suggests.

Fixed daily or weekly debits are the same every time, regardless of sales. They’re easier to plan for, but they need more headroom, because a slow week doesn’t reduce them. A fixed debit sized comfortably for an average week can bite hard in a wet fortnight.

As a rule of thumb, the less flexible the collection, the more of your quiet-week headroom you should leave untouched.

If you’d like a second opinion on your numbers, a real person can run through them with you after a 60-second enquiry.

An illustrative example

Illustrative only. A bakery with two counters takes about $26k a week on card in an average week and about $18k in its slowest normal week, usually in winter. It’s been offered an advance of $80k, collected as a fixed weekly debit.

The owner runs the quiet-week test on an $18k week:

• Fixed costs including rent, wages and super: about $10k
• Flour, dairy and other suppliers at that level of trade: about $5k
• GST and PAYG set aside: about $1.5k

That leaves weekly headroom of roughly $1.5k in a slow week. The proposed weekly debit is higher than that. In a good week it would be fine; in winter the bakery would be dipping into its own reserves to make the payment.

The owner goes back with a smaller request of $45k, spread over a longer period, to cover the new deck oven only, which will lift capacity for the Christmas trade. The weekly debit now sits comfortably inside the quiet-week headroom. The rest of the original plan, a café refit, waits until the oven has paid its way. For more on how lenders view this industry, see bakery business loans.

What if your quiet weeks are very quiet?

If your takings swing heavily with the seasons, a card-based advance sized on your average may never feel comfortable. Some alternatives:

• A business line of credit lets you draw only what you need, when you need it, and repay as trade picks up.
• Seasonal business loans look at your whole year, not just recent months, and can be structured around your peaks.
• A working capital loan with weekly or monthly repayments may be easier to budget for than daily collections.
• Property-secured finance from $20k to $5m can offer a larger amount over a longer term if you own property. Our secured or unsecured tool helps you see which way you lean.

Unsecured and cash-flow options typically sit between $5k and $500k, sized on turnover and bank statements.

Is a bigger offer ever the right choice?

Sometimes. If the extra money funds something that clearly earns more than it costs, such as stock you know will sell or equipment that lifts output, a larger advance can make sense. The test is purpose, not appetite.

Ask yourself three questions before accepting the full amount:

• What exactly will each dollar be used for?
• When will that use start earning back the cost?
• Will it have paid for itself before the advance is fully collected?

If you can’t answer all three, borrow less. Many providers will offer a top-up later if you need it.

Know your number? Let’s see what fits it

If you’ve run the quiet-week test and know the collection you can live with, you’re already ahead of most applicants. The next step is matching that number to a product, whether that’s a card-based advance, a line of credit or something else entirely.

Our enquiry takes about 60 seconds, and there’s no credit check when you first enquire. We don’t send your details to a pile of lenders, and there’s no spray-and-pray. A real person looks at your takings, your quiet weeks and what you want the money for, then calls you to talk through options that fit. Please fill the form in accurately, including the amount you actually need, so we can get it right first time.

Find an advance that fits your quiet weeks →