Professional services finance, billable, bankable

Services firms sell time, and time is invoiced after it's spent. Growth means hiring ahead of billings, and a big client paying late can pinch hard. We fund firms quickly, without a stack of paperwork.

What professional services use fast finance for

Hire new staffNo property neededBuy a businessWith or without propertyFit-out or renovateWith or without propertyFix a cash-flow gapWith or without propertyPay an ATO or tax debtWith or without propertyFund a marketing pushNo property needed

Best-fit loan types

Work in progress is the sector’s balance-sheet problem

An accounting firm, agency, consultancy or law practice sells time. Time is spent as it is incurred and billed afterwards, sometimes well afterwards, and collected later again. Between doing the work and holding the cash there can be a quarter, and the whole of it sits on the balance sheet as work in progress, which is an asset no lender will advance much against.

That is the structural squeeze. The costs are almost entirely salaries, which are non-negotiable and fortnightly. The asset is almost entirely people, who cannot be pledged. A firm can be highly profitable, growing and short of cash simultaneously, and there is nothing wrong with it.

Seasonality sharpens it in some disciplines. An accounting practice carries staff through quiet months to be ready for a compressed compliance season; an agency funds a pitch and a campaign build before a retainer starts. In both cases the cost precedes the revenue by design.

The asset problem, and how it is solved

Professional services firms are the least attractive small-business borrowers to a secured lender and among the most attractive to an unsecured one, which is the opposite of most sectors. There is no plant, no stock and no property in the business; there is a client list, a team and a pipeline, none of which is security.

In practice, funding usually comes from one of two places. Where a principal or director owns property personally — which is common in this sector — that property secures funding up to $5 million with no financials and funding in as little as 24 hours, and the firm’s own thin balance sheet is simply not part of the assessment.

Where no property is available, cash-flow lending assessed from bank statements works well, because professional services firms typically show exactly what that assessment wants: regular deposits, predictable outgoings and no inventory. It is smaller money, but it is the right shape for funding a payroll gap rather than a capital purchase.

What firms borrow for

Can you fund a firm that owns nothing?

It depends on whether anyone connected to the firm owns property, not on whether the firm does. A practice operating entirely from a leased office with a director who owns a home is, for our purposes, a property-secured file. The loan is secured against the home and the firm’s balance sheet barely enters it.

Where nobody has property, the options are genuinely narrower and it is better to say so than to run you through an application. Unsecured cash-flow lending is available and works, with the caveat that most of the Australian market caps it around $150,000 and assesses it from trading data. Our lender comparison sets out which of the main lenders do this and on what terms.

The one thing worth avoiding is applying repeatedly across lenders of the same type. Each application leaves a credit enquiry, and a cluster of them reads badly to everyone who looks afterwards. Work out which half of the market you are in first, then apply once.

Two fast lanes

1. Check eligibility60 seconds online, with no credit score impact.
2. We pick your fastest laneProperty-secured (up to $5M, no financials) or cash-flow (bank statements).
3. Get a decisionUsually the same business day, with every cost in writing.
4. Get fundedIn as little as 2 hours (cash-flow) or 24 hours (property-secured).

Frequently asked questions