PDQ Funding: who you'd actually be borrowing from, and what a card machine loan costs

PDQ Funding is a broker, not a lender. It says so on its own terms page, and it's paid a commission by the lender it introduces you to. So the name on your agreement will be someone else's, and the product behind it is a merchant cash advance: a lump sum repaid as a slice of your card takings, priced as a factor rather than an interest rate. What that costs you depends almost entirely on how fast your sales clear it.

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Is PDQ Funding a lender?

No. Its terms page puts it plainly: 'We are a credit broker, not a lender.' Its homepage says the same thing in different words – 'We don't lend money or promise funding' – and its about page adds who decides: 'We introduce businesses to funding providers; the provider assesses your application and makes the funding decision.'

Credit where it's due, because this market doesn't always manage it. PDQ Funding says 'broker, not a lender' in at least six places across its site, and it answers the question most brokers leave you to ask: 'We do not charge you a fee for using our services. We receive a commission from the lender we successfully introduce you to.' It also warns you about its own product, noting that collections 'reduce the card income available for everyday expenses'. All of that was on its site on 14 October 2026.

Being a broker is not a mark against anyone, and our own research says so. In our SME Expert Index, published in August 2025, 61% of small business finance brokers told us they put more than half their applications to alternative lenders rather than to a bank, and 71% said mainstream banks were pulling back from small business lending. A good broker knows which funders will look at a company like yours, which saves you finding out one rejection at a time. That's worth paying for, and in this model the funder pays it.

What it does change is where to look for your answers. A broker's website describes a product category; your terms come from whoever's name is on the agreement. Worth knowing before you compare anything.

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What PDQ Funding arranges

The product is a merchant cash advance, which PDQ Funding also calls a merchant loan or a card terminal loan. 'PDQ' is the old banking name for the card machine itself, short for Process Data Quickly, and if that's what brought you here we explain how the terminals work and what they cost separately.

You take a lump sum now and repay it out of your card sales as they happen. PDQ Funding says the share taken is 'typically between 5% and 20%' of your credit and debit card sales, collected automatically, so you repay more in a strong week and less in a quiet one. Nothing comes out on a day you take no card payments. That's the appeal, and it's a genuine one – it's a form of revenue-based finance, where what you owe each day follows what you sold.

It is not technically a loan, which is why you won't usually see an interest rate. Instead the provider applies a factor: a multiplier fixed at the start that sets the total you'll repay, whatever happens afterwards. That single sentence explains most of what follows.

On how much, PDQ Funding publishes two different ranges on the same day. Its merchant loan page offers £5,000 to £200,000, 'subject to approval'; its limited company page says £10,000 to £400,000. Treat both as indicative rather than as an offer, since the amount a funder will advance usually tracks your monthly card turnover.

To be eligible you'll need average monthly card sales of at least £5,000 and 12 months of trading. PDQ Funding is explicit that it can't fund start-ups. It publishes a decision in under 24 hours, and says credit checks and funding times vary by lender – which is the honest answer to a question a lot of pages in this market dodge. There are checks. They're just weighted towards your card takings rather than your balance sheet, which is why a company a bank has turned down can still get an offer.

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What a card machine loan actually costs

Here is PDQ Funding's own illustration, from its homepage: 'a £20,000 advance with an agreed total repayment of £24,000 has a £4,000 cost'. A factor of 1.20. As a headline it sounds mild. Twenty per cent to borrow twenty grand, no interest to track, nothing to calculate.

The thing that number doesn't tell you is how long you'll have the money for, and that's what decides whether £4,000 is cheap or expensive. The £4,000 is fixed on day one. The time you take to repay is not – it's whatever your card sales do.

So the same £4,000 looks like this, depending on how quickly your takings clear the advance:

The arithmetic, so you can check it: you receive £20,000 and hand back £24,000 in instalments. Over 18 months that works out at an equivalent rate of about 27% a year. Over 12 months, about 41%. Over six months, about 90%. We've assumed equal monthly instalments, which understates it slightly, because real collections come out daily.

Read that the right way round, because it's the opposite of what intuition says. Trading well makes an advance more expensive, not less. A strong season clears it faster, the £4,000 stays the same, and you've paid £4,000 for six months of funding instead of 18. There's no rebate for speed, because the cost was never calculated from time in the first place.

This is also why providers don't quote an APR, and they're not being evasive about it. There genuinely isn't one. An annual rate assumes a known term, and the whole design of the product is that the term isn't known. That's a fair reason not to publish a figure, and it's a poor reason for you not to work one out before you sign, using the repayment period you actually expect.

Two numbers make that comparison honest. Ask for the total repayable in pounds, and ask what share of card sales is being collected. Then take your own card takings for the past few months, work out how long that share would take to repay the total, and put it against what the same money would cost elsewhere over the same period.

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When an advance is the right answer

For some businesses it's the better product, and not as a consolation prize.

If your card takings swing hard between a good month and a bad one, a fixed monthly instalment is a real risk. It doesn't care that February was quiet. An advance does: collections shrink with your sales, and stop entirely when you're not trading. For a seaside café, a seasonal retailer, a hospitality business with a dead January, or anyone whose quiet period is predictable but whose income isn't, that's genuine protection rather than a feature.

It also reaches companies other routes don't. A business with no assets to secure, a short filing history, or a credit file that doesn't flatter it can still have excellent card takings – and the card takings are what a funder is pricing. Where a bank sees a thin balance sheet, a funder sees money arriving through the terminal every week.

The judgement to make isn't 'is this expensive', it's whether you can carry the collection. The share comes off your gross takings, not your profit. If your operating margin is thinner than the percentage being collected, the advance will tighten your cash flow every single day, which is the trap worth naming, and it's the thing that leads people into taking a second advance to service the first.

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What to ask before you sign

Five questions, and none of them are awkward to ask:

• Which company's name is on the agreement, and is that company on the Financial Services Register? You're contracting with the funder, not the broker who introduced you.
• What's the total repayable in pounds, and what percentage of card sales is being collected? Everything else follows from these two.
• Is there any reduction for settling early? Some funders offer a rebate and many don't. Assume not unless it's written down.
• What happens if I change card terminal provider, or my card sales drop to nothing for a while? Collections are tied to your merchant account, so switching providers or a long closure can breach the agreement. Get the position in writing before you sign, not after.
• Is a director's personal guarantee part of this? PDQ Funding's site doesn't say, and it varies by funder. A guarantee means a director is personally responsible if the company can't repay, so it's not a detail to discover late.

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Where else card-taking companies look

If most of your income arrives by bank transfer rather than card, an advance is the wrong shape for you, and two alternatives fit better. Invoice finance releases cash against invoices you've issued but not been paid for, which suits anyone trading on 30-day terms or longer. A business overdraft gives you a buffer you only pay for when you dip into it, though it's harder to get and usually smaller than you'd like.

If an advance is what you want, PDQ Funding isn't the only route to one. Other brokers and several funders go direct, and the questions above work on all of them. Comparing two or three offers on total repayable and collection percentage is worth an afternoon.

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When a fixed term you can see the end of fits better

An advance can only reach money that comes through a card machine. Payroll, a VAT bill, rent, and a supplier who only takes a bank transfer all sit outside it, and they rarely arrive in proportion to your sales.

An iwoca Flexi-Loan is a business loan with flexible repayment options, and it's built around the opposite arrangement. You choose a fixed term of between 12 months and five years, so you know the repayment schedule from the outset. Because there's no fee for repaying early, you can clear it as soon as the cash arrives – many of our customers only take out our finance for a few weeks, or even days.

Put that next to the arithmetic above and the difference is the one that matters here. We charge interest on what you still owe, for the days you owe it, so repaying early costs you less. An advance's cost is set on day one, so repaying early costs you the same. Same behaviour from you, opposite result. You also get 30 days to draw the money down after we approve you, and you don't have to take the full amount, so you can line funding up before a quiet quarter rather than during one.

Flexi-Loan in action: Dovetail and Slate. Guy Walker's recruitment business turns over £60m and has a summer dip built into its year, when schools break up and invoices stop. Rather than commit to funding for longer than he needed, he bridged VAT, salaries, and supplier bills through the gap and repaid as cash flow recovered. Read Guy's story

This bites hardest on companies whose costs land on fixed dates while their income doesn't, and seasonal businesses feel both sides of it – the quiet months an advance handles well, and the payroll and tax dates it can't touch.

Our business loan rates start at 1.5% per 30 days. You can borrow £1,000 to £1 million, there are no fees on 12-month loans, and there's never a fee for repaying early. We lend to UK limited companies, and every new Flexi-Loan needs a personal guarantee from at least one director. A decision is made within 24 hours, though it might be longer depending on the complexity of the request.

It isn't the right answer for everyone on this page. If your takings genuinely collapse for months at a time, a repayment that pauses with your sales may suit you better than one that doesn't, and that's worth more than a slightly lower rate.