MCA Suite

MCA Suite Concepts

MCA Suite is a platform for funders and brokers to manage merchant cash advance relationships and track deals from lead to collection stages. Users of MCA Suite need to first understand the following concepts; once that happens, MCA Suite will become a very powerful tool to help brokers and funders alike.

1.  Treat MCA Suite as a specialized address book. MCA Suite is designed to help you manage all of your MCA relationships. Between brokers, merchants, funders, investors and the myriad other entities involved in an MCA deal, a complex network begins to develop. MCA Suite helps you manage all of those moving parts by treating both people and companies as contacts and using them as building blocks to tie relationships together.

2.  There are two kinds of Contacts – a Company and a Person. A “Company” contact can be any merchant, broker, funder, collector, or credit card processor in your network. A “Person” contact is any individual who serves as a point-of-contact for those companies (e.g., a merchant owner, a broker within a brokerage, etc.) or a single, individual contact unaffiliated with any company. When a Contact is created, MCA Suite may create two records in the database - a Person (when there is a first and last name) and a Company (when there is a Company and/or DBA).

Here's a related article with more information on:  "What is a Contact?"

There are five key contact types in MCA Suite:

a.         Broker – A company or individual that connects merchants with funders.

b.         Collector – A company or individual that helps funders collect future receivables from merchants.

c.         Funder – A company or individual with cash to buy future receivables from merchants.

d.         Investor – A company or individual investing in cash advance deals independently or with the funder.

e.         Merchant – A company or individual that will take a lump cash sum in exchange for future receivables.

Contact types are required for all contacts entered into MCA Suite. A contact can have multiple contact types, i.e., funder and investor.

Using these five key contact types, MCA Suite can help funders and brokers manage all of their relationships.

Here's a related article with more information on: "What are Contact Types?"

3.  Each Contact Person can have one of these four statuses associated with a person.

Contact status defines the person's current relationship with your organization. The four contacts statuses are: 

• Lead – The lead status refers to contacts received from marketing partners and third-party vendors (they can also be manually added). These contacts are considered new leads by funders and brokers. Sales managers can assign these contacts to brokers/agents to follow-up on the lead. MCA Suite has two options for importing leads into the system: via MCA Suite’s Web API or through an Excel/CSV file import.
• Assigned – The assigned status means the contact has been assigned to a broker/agent (user in MCA Suite) to work on the lead. MCA Suite allows sales managers to set contact-level security to allow all brokers to see contact information, or for one broker to see only one set of contacts.
• Active – The active status means the contact is actively working with the funder or broker. This can be set manually or by simply creating a deal or an application for merchant contact-types (for the company connected to that particular contact person).
• Declined – It means this contact does not want to do business with the funder or broker. A contact cannot be set to “declined” if s/he is associated with a current merchant cash advance deal.

4.  Access Permissions can be set at the Contact and Deal levels. Every record created in MCA Suite, whether it's a Contact Company page, Contact Person page, or Deal page, can have access permission set to manage which users have access to which pages. The three main levels of access permission are:

• Everyone - the most global access setting. This means that every system user in your instance of MCA Suite will have access to the page(s) set to this permission level.
• User+ - the most restrictive access setting. This means the user who created the page will have automatic access to it. That user or any admins can then decide to grant ADDITIONAL users access. Simply select names of the agents to whom you would like grant access permission from the dropdown list of system users.
• Team - if you have teams created in your MCA Suite instance, you can set access permission on a team (i.e., group of users) level basis for each record (company, person or deal). For more information about Teams, please see the support article, "How Do I Set Up Teams?"

Note: Administrators will have access to all pages in MCA Suite at all times. Access Permission settings will not bear any effect on Admin access.

Access Permission Logic. When you create a Contact (i.e., John Doe at ACME, Inc.), the Person and Company will have the same Access Permission upon creation. You can set the Company (ACME, Inc.) or the Person (John Doe) to a more restricted access such as "User+" If a restricted access permission is set to "User+" and no additional users are added to the permission list, the Contact (Company or Person) will not appear on search results by any system users except for Administrators and the page creator. 

Deal level security is dependent on Company level security. In order for non-admins (i.e., agents) to have access to a Deal created for a Company (Contact), those users MUST first have access to the Company record. A user will not know the Deal exists in MCA Suite if s/he does not have access permission to view the Company details first. In that sense, Deal access permission is nested within Company access permission. 

5.  A Deal is associated with a Company. Deals are typically merchant cash advance deals. Funders and brokers offer deals to companies and not to individuals. A deal contains offer details, collection methods, documents, commission schedules and other information required to take the deal from the underwriting stage to final funding.

6.  Each Deal has a stage and a status. A Deal stage is a system generated status that cannot be changed by MCA Suite users. MCA Suite users can define individual statuses associated with the Deal. An administrator can also choose to hide Deal Stages. 

• New – when a new Deal has been created in the system. Users can also apply a Deal Status to signify where specifically the deal is in their operations. From a systems standpoint, MCA Suite will consider a Deal as “New” until it moves to the next stage.
• Active – A Deal automatically becomes “Active” when two or more deal notes are added to the Deal. For brokers, a deal is active when submissions exist.
• Funded – MCA Suite defines a Deal as “Funded” when Deal Tracking is turned on, i.e. when a user clicks the “Track Deal” button for a Deal.  Brokers have the option to select various Submission Offers, which automatically turns on Deal Tracking for a Deal (selecting an offer is equal to funding a deal). So for Brokers, a Deal will also enter the “Funded” stage once a Submission Offer is selected.
• Paid – A stage where the funded Deal has an amount outstanding less than or equal to zero. This means the Deal was successfully repaid by the merchant.
• Declined – A stage manually initiated by a user. This stage will be used primarily by brokers when a lead goes cold. To set a Deal to the “Declined” Stage, simply click on the “Decline” button on the Deal Summary page.
• Defaulted – Another manually set stage. This stage should be set when the user determines that the merchant can no longer pay back the loan and that it is no longer possible to collect against the amount outstanding for that deal. Users can go to the Deal Tracking page and click on the “default” button to push the Deal to the Default stage.

• Submitted – Brokers only.  When a submission has been created to at least one funder, the deal stage will become "Submitted".  
• Has Offer – Brokers only.  When an offer is received by a funder and entered into the system, the stage of the deal will become "Has Offer".
  
• Contract Out  – Brokers only.  A manually set stage when the Broker marks a submission forwarded to a merchant.  Click the Contract Out button on the submission page.

7.  An MCA Application is an application a funder or broker sends to a merchant to apply for a cash advance. The MCA Application contains three main elements: company information, contact/owner information and deal details. When an MCA Application is created, MCA Suite automatically creates and builds the relationship between those three elements.

8.  A Submission is a deal sent to an outside funder to review and make an offer on. A submission includes essential information like merchant business info, merchant owner credit info, initial amount requested, supporting documents and any additional stipulations required by the funder. All of the files uploaded to the Documents section of a deal (which contains underwriting details and also serves as a document repository for the deal) can be attached to the submission sent to the funder.