Which funding products does this apply to?

Merchant Cash Advance, Working Capital, Revenue-Based Financing. Each has its own page listing the funders in this directory that offer it and what each one publishes about its terms.

Is this specific to grocery & convenience?

It is written around how a grocery & convenience business actually generates and collects cash, which is what makes its funding problem different. The mechanics transfer; the arithmetic may not.

The Find Me Funders research desk. Some drafting is AI-assisted, and every page that is says so at the top, including whether a person has checked its claims yet.

How do I know a figure here is right?

Where a page carries the green notice, its claims were checked against the sources listed at the end and a reviewer is named. Where it carries the amber one, nobody has verified it yet and you should confirm anything you plan to act on.

Are the examples real deals?

No. Every worked example is labelled illustrative and exists to show the arithmetic. What any particular lender charges is on that lender's page, where it publishes it.

Why do you never say what a typical rate is?

Because we cannot source it. A market average assembled from lenders who do not publish prices is a guess with a decimal point on it. Where a lender publishes a figure, we show that figure and say where it came from.

Is this financial or legal advice?

No. It is general information about how these products work. Outcomes depend on your contract and your state, and a lawyer or accountant licensed where you are is the person to ask about your situation.

Can I reuse this content?

Quote a paragraph with a link back. Do not republish whole articles.

Do fuel and lottery sales count as revenue for an advance?

A store depositing 620,000 a month can be earning 65,000 of gross profit on it. Sizing an advance off the deposits produces a payment the store cannot make.

By Find Me Funders research desk Updated 14 September 2026 967 words 4 min read

Drafted with AI assistance. Not yet independently checked. Nobody has verified the claims on this page against a source, so treat the figures and legal points as a starting point rather than as settled, and confirm anything you are about to act on. How we check things.

Do fuel and lottery sales count as revenue when a funder sizes a cash advance?

They appear in deposits, and careless underwriting will size an offer off them, but they should not be treated as revenue in any economic sense. Fuel is sold at a margin of a few cents on the gallon and lottery pays a small commission on the ticket face, so both gross enormous amounts of cash through the account while contributing very little gross profit. A store that accepts an advance sized on total deposits is agreeing to a remittance that can exceed its entire gross profit. Ask any funder to size the offer off in-store merchandise sales, and hand them the pump and lottery reports to prove the split.

A convenience store with fuel deposits 620,000 a month and is offered an advance sized off that figure. The offer looks generous and the arithmetic underneath it does not work.

Illustrative only —suppose the 620,000 splits as 410,000 of fuel, 74,000 of lottery and 136,000 of in-store merchandise. Apply plausible margins: fuel at 5.6 per cent, which is roughly 22 cents on a 3.95 gallon; lottery commission at 5.5 per cent of ticket sales; in-store merchandise at 28 per cent.

Fuel gross profit: 22,960
Lottery commission: 4,070
Merchandise gross profit: 38,080
Total gross profit: 65,110, which is 10.5 per cent of deposits

Now size an advance the way a deposit-driven product does. Eighty per cent of one month's deposits is 496,000. A remittance set at 8 per cent of daily deposits collects 49,600 a month. At 12 per cent it collects 74,400 a month — more than the store's entire gross profit, before a single employee is paid.

That is the whole problem, stated in one number.

Why fuel and lottery behave this way

Fuel is a pass-through with a cost that moves daily.You buy a load, you sell it, and the difference is cents. The cash that goes through the bank belongs almost entirely to the supplier and to the taxing authorities. Motor fuel taxes are collected in the pump price and remitted, and they are not yours at any point — which puts them in the same category as sales tax, discussed in do sales tax and payroll withholding count as revenue.

Lottery is an agency arrangement.You sell a ticket at face value, the state takes the face, and you are paid a commission on sales and often a small bonus on winning tickets sold. You also pay out prizes from the register up to a limit and are reimbursed through settlement. Both the sales and the prize payouts move through your account, sometimes inflating both deposits and withdrawals, and neither is revenue.

Both are also the reason your deposits look stable.Fuel volume is relatively insensitive to your merchandising, which makes the deposit line look reassuringly flat to an underwriter reading statements without context. The flat line is the pass-through, not the business.

What a careful funder does

The better shops in this market ask for the split before quoting. Specifically, they ask for:

Pump or dispenser reports showing gallons and fuel dollars by month
Lottery settlement statements showing sales, commission and prize reimbursements
In-store register reports by department, separating cigarettes, beer, packaged food, prepared food and general merchandise
The fuel supply agreement, which sets your cost basis and may contain volume commitments

They then size the offer off merchandise sales, or off gross profit, rather than off deposits. On the numbers above, 80 per cent of merchandise sales is 108,800, not 496,000. That is a smaller offer and a survivable one.

A funder who declines to look at the split and quotes off total deposits is either not underwriting the category or is relying on the personal guarantee to carry the risk. Both are worth knowing before you sign.

The margin mix is the other half of the story

Within the 136,000 of merchandise, the departments behave very differently. Cigarettes move enormous dollars at a thin margin and are a large share of merchandise sales in many stores. Prepared food and fountain carry high margins on small dollars. A store whose merchandise line is mostly tobacco has a lower blended margin than the 28 per cent used above, and the gross profit falls accordingly.

Work out your own number rather than using the illustration. Take twelve months of department-level sales, apply your actual cost of goods by department, and divide the resulting gross profit by total deposits. That percentage is the single most useful figure you can hand an underwriter, and most owners have never calculated it.

The arithmetic to run before accepting any offer

Compute monthly gross profit, by department, for the last twelve months.
Subtract fixed operating costs — payroll, rent, utilities, insurance, card processing, maintenance. What remains is what can service debt.
Convert the offer's remittance into a monthly dollar figure. If it is a percentage of deposits, apply it to your actual deposits, including fuel and lottery, because that is what it will be applied to.
Compare. If the remittance exceeds the figure from step two, the store will fund the payments by shrinking inventory, and a convenience store that shrinks inventory loses sales in the same week.
Check the shrink and the shortage. Thin-margin retail is unforgiving of shrink; the interaction is set out in grocery and convenience store funding, thin margins and shrink.

What to ask for

Ask the funder to state, in writing, what revenue figure the offer was sized on and what the remittance will be calculated against. If the calculation base is total bank deposits, ask for it to be changed to in-store merchandise sales or to a fixed dollar amount. A fixed daily or weekly amount you have tested against gross profit is far safer here than a percentage of a deposit stream that is mostly other people's money.

Ask whether fuel card settlements, which can arrive on a different cycle from ordinary card deposits, are included. Ask how the funder treats the days you receive a lottery reimbursement, which can spike a single day's deposits substantially.

Refuse an offer whose remittance you cannot pay out of gross profit in a slow month. And refuse to submit bank statements without the department split attached — not because a funder is entitled to it, but because the alternative is being sized on a number that describes the fuel supplier's business rather than yours.