Choosing a Customer-Financing Platform: The 20-Question Checklist

Financing platforms are easy to sign up for and annoying to leave, which is exactly the wrong shape for a casual decision. The selection work is not hard, but it has to be done in the right order: figure out what your customers need, then interrogate each candidate platform with the same questions, in writing, and read the paper before anyone trains your staff. This checklist is the interrogation. Twenty questions, six groups, with the reason each question exists and where the true answer lives, which is almost never the sales call.

The vocabulary comes from the series hub; the platform reviews in this series are worked examples of these questions applied.

The twenty questions

How to run it

Send questions 1 through 12 and 17 to each candidate as a written list and require written answers; the speed and completeness of the response is itself diagnostic. Answer 13 through 15 with your own hands: run a test application on a personal device, at your counter, and walk the decline path. Answer 16, 18, and 20 by reading, the program marketing guidelines, the public record, and the merchant agreement in full. Answer 19 by calling references in your trade, not the vendor's curated list if you can avoid it.

Then weight the answers by your situation. A contractor with five-figure tickets should weight amounts, funding mechanics, and recourse most heavily. A retailer with a broad credit spectrum should weight questions 3 through 5, and read the waterfall comparison before deciding how much approval breadth to buy and at what complexity. Every merchant should weight question 6 and its refund sibling, and the modeling approach in the fees explainer turns those answers into a per-funded-job cost you can compare across candidates.

Finish with a pilot, not a rollout: sixty to ninety days, financing offered on every qualifying job, tracking offered, applied, accepted, and funded, plus blended fee cost. The pilot converts the vendor's claims into your data, and it is the only step on this page that cannot be faked by a good sales team.

Red flags worth naming

A vendor that will not put fee schedules or approval-rate definitions in writing. An agreement with an exclusivity clause priced as if it were boilerplate. A recourse section that makes you the insurer of customer disputes. A refusal to let you see the customer agreement before signing the merchant one. None of these is exotic; all of them have appeared in real programs, and each is a reason to keep shopping in a market with plenty of sellers.

Who this is not for

This checklist assumes you have already decided that customer financing fits your business. If your average ticket is small, if your customers are other businesses, or if you have not yet had customers asking to pay over time, the selection problem is premature; measure demand first by tracking how often payment flexibility comes up in lost bids. And if you are looking for financing on your own receivables or inventory, that is merchant funding, a different category with different diligence entirely, and none of these twenty questions is aimed at it.

Common mistakes

• Running the checklist on one vendor instead of two or three, which turns diligence into paperwork for a decision already made.
• Accepting verbal answers on fees, approval definitions, and recourse, then discovering the agreement says otherwise.
• Skipping the test application and decline-path walk, the two cheapest pieces of evidence available.
• Weighting all twenty questions equally instead of by your ticket size, credit mix, and workflow.
• Signing exclusivity or auto-renewal terms nobody read, and learning about them at renegotiation time.
• Treating the pilot as optional, then scaling a fee structure you never measured.

How to verify

The checklist is itself a verification instrument, so the meta-step is short: keep everything in writing, in one file. Save the vendor's written answers, the dated fee schedule, the merchant agreement as signed, the customer-facing disclosures for every plan you enabled, and your pilot numbers. When terms change, and they will, the file is what lets you notice, and it is what you will want in hand for any dispute, audit, or renegotiation. Where public records matter, questions 2 and 18, verify directly: the lender named in the actual disclosures, the CFPB complaint database, your state attorney general's actions, and, for platforms owned by public companies, the parent's filings. If a claim in a sales deck matters to your decision and cannot be traced to one of those documents, treat it as unverified and ask again in writing.