SumUp Cash Advance review: how the offer works and what it really costs

SumUp Cash Advance is funding offered to existing SumUp merchants and sized against the sales they process through SumUp. It is not a facility you apply for in the usual sense. SumUp's own page describes a personalised offer based on your sales through SumUp, with eligible merchants contacted directly, which means the practical route in is to keep trading through SumUp and wait for an offer to appear.

In substance it is a merchant cash advance. You receive a lump sum, agree a single total to repay, and SumUp automatically deducts a set percentage of your card sales until the balance clears. SumUp states that funds reach the registered payout bank account within two working days, that you pay only a fixed fee agreed upfront based on the size of the advance, and that repaying early carries no additional fee.

That structure is standard for the product. Across the wider UK market the deducted share, often called the holdback, tends to sit between 5 and 20 per cent of takings, and the price is expressed as a factor rate rather than an interest rate, commonly between 1.1 and 1.5. An advance is not a loan: it is the sale of a slice of future takings at a discount, and where it is written to a limited company for business purposes it generally falls outside the Financial Conduct Authority's consumer credit rules.

SumUp's customer base is heavily weighted towards small, card taking businesses: market traders, mobile therapists, cafes, independent shops, tradespeople and event sellers. For those businesses the appeal is real. The offer is already sized against sales SumUp can see, there is almost no paperwork, and the money arrives quickly.

It works best where SumUp handles most of your card income. If SumUp is a secondary terminal alongside a main processor, the deduction is drawn from a narrow slice of your revenue, and the balance can take considerably longer to clear than the illustration suggests. It is worth calculating what proportion of total takings actually flows through SumUp before assuming a repayment period.

It fits poorly where income is mostly cash or bank transfer, and it is the wrong instrument for anything with a payback measured in years. There is also a lock in effect that is easy to overlook: while a balance is outstanding, repayment depends on you continuing to process through SumUp, which makes switching terminal provider awkward. If you were already considering a move, do that thinking first.

The pricing model is clean. One fixed fee, agreed before you accept, based on the size of the advance, with no interest accruing and no charge for settling early. Everything you will pay is known on day one, which compares well with facilities that add arrangement or default charges later.

Two caveats matter. First, SumUp does not publish a rate card, so the fee attached to your offer is only visible inside your own account. Anyone quoting a specific SumUp rate without seeing your offer is guessing. Second, the marketing line that you pay nothing back when you make no sales sits alongside a minimum monthly payment requirement, and the two need reading together. Repayments do fall when trade falls, but there is a floor, and that floor is precisely what causes difficulty during a genuinely bad quarter. Find out what the minimum is on your offer before you accept.

Because the total repayable is fixed, clearing the advance quickly does not save you money, it simply compresses the same fee into a shorter period and raises the effective cost. Our guide to factor rates and fixed fee pricing explains why this cannot be read across to an APR, and the cash advance calculator will give you a total repayable and a realistic duration for a given deduction percentage.

The obvious comparisons are the other card acquirers offering funding to their own merchants. Dojo and the Worldpay business cash advance follow the same pattern of an offer sized from processing history and repaid from takings. Worldpay is the most transparent of the three, publishing a funding range and specific eligibility criteria, and naming Liberis as the provider behind the product.

Worth knowing: SumUp appears among the platform partners listed on YouLend's own website, and YouLend is an embedded finance provider that builds funding into other companies' platforms. SumUp's product page does not name a third party funder, so the sensible step is to ask who you are actually contracting with before you accept, because that determines who you deal with if something goes wrong.

If your card income is spread across more than one terminal, an independent provider such as 365 Business Finance can usually size an advance against all of it rather than one channel. Our comparison of the best merchant cash advance providers in the UK covers the field.

Get four numbers: the amount advanced, the total repayable in pounds, the percentage of sales being deducted, and the minimum monthly payment. Then check the last figure against your quietest recent month. If the business only works on optimistic sales assumptions, the advance is too large.

Ask as well who the agreement is with, whether a credit search will be recorded, and what happens to an outstanding balance if you stop processing through SumUp. SumUp sets out its own description of the product on its cash advance page. Eligibility, fees and repayment terms are set by SumUp and change from time to time, so confirm the live terms in your own offer rather than relying on any summary, including this one.