Good news, bad news, eh @cmeshine. There are a number of reasons that COULD be part of why your new offer was lower.
- Square might be slowing down on how much loan exposure they want to have on their balance sheet. They are, after all, a publicly traded company that has to answer to their shareholders and investors.
- If our sales are flat or at least not growing at a good rate to cover inflation and higher interest, then Square’s algorithm understands that inflation is eating into our available cash to pay bills, etc. Flat sales (or very slowly growing sales) are always red flags to lenders, Square or not.
- Sometimes how long it takes us to pay off our current loans can be a factor. Let’s say that previous loans were paid off with automatic payments in 8-10 months in the past. But for this current loan it took us 12-15 months. That tells Square that our card processing volume can’t keep you with higher loan amounts. Yes, they give us 18 months to fully pay a loan, but they obviously prefer that we pay them off closer to the 12 month mark.
- If our cash/card ratio drastically changes, and cash spikes or is consistently higher than historical for our business, that is another red flag. Since Square must only consider card volume when calculating repayment rates this can become a problem.
Of course, I’m not saying that any of these contributed to your lower offer. I’m just throwing out a few reasons why this CAN happen.
I would not plan on that happening. In order to offer multiple loans a minute and start 1 loan every minute you would have to have thousands to be looking at the data of millions of users. Even with sheer numbers like that, they might not get back around to looking at your account for a year just due to the amount of users.
The scale of something like this is tens of thousands of times more than a local bank to be loaning out $ 1.32 billion in 90 days to over 129,000 people. It is only possible because of the scale available because the algorithms can look at thousands of user's data per minute.
If you want a person to look at your papers and accounting and taxes etc then it is time to head on down to your local bank. That is what I do and I don't get individual loans, we have a RLOC Revolving line of credit. Saves a lot and is easy to just hit it for 12 days to pay a bill early or to buy a new refrigerator and only have to pay interest on the number of days you borrow. 95% of the time it costs me nothing,
In general, it appears that most Square Loans are not starting to be be offered until the loan is 80-90% paid back if not fully. This is just observed from posts of people getting offers and loans, not an official stance. So you are getting closer to maybe getting an offer. Getting it early is almost like a penalty because you are paying back your loan with part of the new loan. There isn't anyone that can tell you any different than what others have said as that is how the loans work there isn't a button that someone can push that will turn your offer on as much as we may want that.
The good news is they have never loaned as much money as there are right now. in the last 90 days 129,000 people got loans totaling 1.32 billion dollars. That is 1 loan a minute, just wild numbers.
Keep selling is the best you can do for your business to keep growing and maybe there will be a better opportunity down the road. I know I was upset before about missing out on a purchase and was happily surprised when something better came along. I ended up buying an entire business, property and all, at a bankruptcy auction. Had I bought the property 2 months earlier I wouldn't have been able to buy the business.
