Fuel goes out weekly. Settlement comes back in 45 days.
That distance is the whole problem, and it has nothing to do with whether you run a good operation. A carrier can be profitable on every load and still be short the week the fuel card posts.
The shape of the gap
- Money out
Fuel on the card the day it is bought. Drivers weekly or every two weeks. Insurance, permits and maintenance on their own schedule, none of which wait.
- Money in
Broker settlement commonly 30 to 45 days after the paperwork clears — longer if a BOL is missing or a rate confirmation does not match.
- The distance
So the money for a load you hauled in week one arrives somewhere in week six, and you have run four more weeks of fuel and payroll in between.
Nothing in that sequence is a sign of a bad business. It is the standard settlement cycle of the industry, and it is why working capital exists in this trade at all.
- 1Day 0Load delivered. The work is done and the invoice goes out.
- 2Day 7Fuel and driver pay. Neither waits for the broker.
- 3Day 14Fuel and driver pay again.
- 4Day 21And again — plus insurance, permits, whatever the truck needed.
- 5Day 28And again. Four weeks funded out of your own pocket.
- 6Day 40Broker settles the load from day zero.
This is not factoring, and the difference matters
If you run freight, you have been offered factoring — selling an invoice at a discount so you get paid on it now instead of in 40 days. It is common in trucking for good reason, and for some carriers it is the right answer.
We do not place factoring. What we place is working capital against the business as a whole rather than against one invoice: an amount that arrives now and is delivered back out of receipts as they come in. The practical difference is what it is secured on and what it does to your broker relationships — factoring puts a third party between you and the people who pay you, and a funding agreement does not.
If factoring is what your situation actually calls for, that is worth knowing before you apply here rather than after. We would rather say so on the first call.
Own authority or leased on changes the picture
A carrier running under its own authority controls who it hauls for and how fast those brokers settle, and its deposits reflect a book of customers. A driver leased onto someone else's authority has a settlement statement rather than a customer list, and the money arrives on somebody else's schedule.
Both are real businesses and both are workable. They are not the same file, and the difference changes what the bank statements are actually showing — which is why it is one of the first things we ask rather than something we work out later.
Seasons are not a weakness, but they have to be visible
Produce season, Q4 retail, weather closing lanes for a fortnight: revenue in this trade moves, and a partner reading three months of statements is reading a slice of that movement without necessarily knowing which slice.
That is worth getting ahead of. If the months on your statements are your slow ones, say so and say why, because the alternative is a file that looks like a business in decline rather than one in February. Context you volunteer is worth more than context discovered later.
What tends to help a carrier file
Two things come up more than anything else, and neither is a requirement. They change which partners a file suits, not whether it is worth submitting.
More than one truck
A second unit reads differently from a single one — not because one truck is a problem, but because the revenue does not stop when a driver is out or a unit is in the shop. Single-truck operations get placed all the time; it is simply a shorter list of partners.
Work that is contracted rather than spot
A dedicated lane, a committed shipper, anything that puts revenue on the calendar instead of on the load board. It tells an underwriter something three months of statements cannot: that next month has work in it already. Running spot is not a mark against you — it is a different file.
Zelle is fine. Only Zelle is not.
It is common in this trade and there is nothing wrong with taking it. But deposits arriving entirely as person-to-person transfers are harder to read as business revenue than the same money arriving as ACH, cheque or card settlement — a transfer does not carry what an invoice carries. If Zelle is the only way you get paid, widening that is one of the few things on this page you can genuinely change in a few weeks.
None of this is a checklist you have to pass, and if you have read it as one, read it again. Our job as a marketplace is to find a funding partner who will take the file as it actually is — that is the entire reason to go through us rather than apply to one funder and treat their answer as the answer. We ask about these things early so we know which partners to put the file in front of, not so we can tell you no.
What we'll ask you
Three questions, early, because they decide how the file gets packaged. None of them is a test and none of them has a wrong answer.
Which brokers or factors you run with, and how fast they settle
This is the difference between a 30-day cycle and a 60-day one, and it is invisible on a bank statement. Two carriers with identical deposits can be in completely different positions depending on who is paying them and when.
Whether you are on your own authority or leased on
It changes what your deposits represent and who your customers actually are. Neither answer is better; they are different files and get packaged differently.
What a week of fuel actually costs you
It is the fastest way to size the gap honestly. An owner who knows this number to within a hundred dollars is telling us something about the operation, and it usually sets the amount worth asking for better than a round figure would.
Which product tends to match this pattern
Not a recommendation about your file — nobody has seen it yet. This is which shape of product matches which shape of gap.
Questions we get from this trade
Do open positions with another funder rule me out?
No, and hiding them is closer to it. Second and third positions are common in this trade and a partner finds them regardless. What changes the outcome is whether the file disclosed them — that is why the application asks, and it is not a trick question.
My credit is poor but my settlements are steady. Is that workable?
It is the situation revenue-based funding exists for, because the question being asked is about how the business trades rather than about a score in isolation. That is not a promise about your file: partners underwrite, we do not, and they will each read it their own way.
I'm an owner-operator with one truck. Am I too small?
Not automatically. The published minimums are the thing to check yourself against — roughly six months in business, $15,000 a month, deposited into a business account. One truck can clear those and plenty do. Revenue running through a personal account is the part that most often stops a small carrier, and it is fixable.
What we can't tell you
What you would be offered, what it would cost, or how fast it would arrive. Funding partners decide all three and put them in writing before you sign anything; we are a broker and not a party to that agreement. We also will not tell you this is the right move for your operation without knowing it — if a fuel card, a factoring arrangement or simply waiting out the cycle is the better answer, that is worth saying, and we would rather say it on the first call than at the end of a week.
One form. Then a real conversation.
About two minutes, and it costs nothing. Tell us who settles your loads and how fast, and we can be useful on the first call rather than the third.