7 min read
Jason, Founder
•
December 28, 2024
It was 11 PM on a Tuesday, and I was staring at a spreadsheet with 247 rows—each one representing an active merchant cash advance. The spreadsheet had crashed twice already that night. My formulas were breaking. The filter wouldn't work properly. And I still hadn't reconciled the ACH pulls from the day before.
This was the moment I knew something had to change.
Not because I'm some visionary who saw the future of fintech. But because I was exhausted, frustrated, and absolutely certain there had to be a better way to run an MCA operation than this.
That's the real story of why LendMatrix exists. Not a grand vision. Just a very specific, very personal frustration.
If you've worked in MCA, you know the drill. Excel is the default tool for everything:
And if you're lucky, you might have separate spreadsheets for each of these. If you're not lucky, it's all one massive file that takes 45 seconds to open and crashes when you try to sort by date.
I was not lucky.
Our "system" was a combination of:
Every morning started with 45 minutes of data entry. Every month-end was a multi-day reconciliation nightmare. Every time someone asked "what's our current portfolio value?" it was a 20-minute exercise in pivot tables and prayer.
Obviously, I looked at what was already on the market. This was a known problem. Surely someone had solved it.
Here's what I found:
Generic CRMs: Salesforce, HubSpot, etc. Great for tracking leads and contacts. Terrible for MCA-specific workflows. You'd spend months customizing them, and they still wouldn't handle things like daily payment tracking or commission clawbacks.
Loan Management Systems: Built for traditional lenders with fixed monthly payments. MCA's revenue-based model broke their assumptions. Factor rates? Holdback percentages? They weren't designed for it.
MCA-Specific Tools: A few existed, but they had problems:
I talked to other MCA operators. Most of them were in the same boat—either suffering with spreadsheets or suffering with software that didn't quite fit.
Through frustration came clarity. Here's what an MCA operation actually needs from its software:
Lead-to-Funded Tracking: Follow a deal from initial contact through application, underwriting, approval, and funding. Know where every deal stands, instantly.
Daily Payment Management: Track every ACH pull against every active advance. Reconcile automatically. Flag NSFs immediately. Calculate remaining balances in real-time.
Revenue-Based Holdback Tracking: MCA isn't fixed payments. The system needs to understand percentage-based collection and adjust accordingly.
Commission Calculation: Handle points, flat fees, residuals. Track clawback scenarios. Know what's owed to whom, and when.
Syndication Support: Multiple investors in a single deal? Different participation percentages? CAF tracking? It needs to handle all of it.
Compliance Documentation: Generate disclosures, track what was sent when, maintain audit trails. Especially important now with state-by-state regulations emerging.
Real-Time Reporting: Portfolio value, collection rates, default rates, commission exposure—all visible instantly, not after a month-end reconciliation.
Multi-Tenant Architecture: For shops running multiple ISOs or serving external clients, true data isolation with shared infrastructure.
So we built it. Not because we wanted to be a software company—because we needed this tool and it didn't exist.
The first version was ugly. Functional, but ugly. It replaced our spreadsheets with a proper database. It tracked applications through a defined workflow. It reconciled payments automatically.
Within a month, our daily data entry dropped from 45 minutes to 5 minutes. Month-end reconciliation went from 3 days to 3 hours. Questions that used to require 20 minutes of Excel work could be answered in seconds.
Other operators noticed. They asked what we were using. We showed them. They wanted it.
That's when LendMatrix became a product, not just an internal tool.
Building software is humbling. Here's what we learned the hard way:
Underestimated syndication complexity: We thought tracking investor participation would be simple. It's not. Different fee structures, different payment waterfalls, CAF calculations, partial payoffs—it took three major rewrites to get this right.
Overbuilt the reporting: Our first reporting system had 40+ canned reports. Nobody used half of them. We stripped it down and focused on the 10 metrics that actually matter.
Ignored mobile too long: Underwriters and brokers work from their phones constantly. Our original desktop-only approach meant missed opportunities. Now mobile is a first-class experience.
Made onboarding too complex: We assumed everyone would want to configure everything from scratch. Most people just want sensible defaults. Now you can be up and running in an afternoon, with customization available when you need it.
LendMatrix today is what I wished existed three years ago:
It's not perfect. We're still learning, still building, still fixing things that don't work quite right. But it's a lot better than that crashed spreadsheet at 11 PM.
The MCA industry is changing. Regulation is increasing. Transparency is becoming mandatory. The operators who survive will be the ones with proper systems—not just for efficiency, but for compliance.
We're building for that future:
We're also committed to staying honest about costs, about what works and what doesn't, about the realities of this industry. The blog posts you're reading are part of that commitment.
I debated writing this. Founder stories can come across as self-congratulatory. "Look how smart we were to build this thing."
That's not the point.
The point is: we built LendMatrix because we needed it. We know the pain because we lived it. And that experience—the late nights, the crashed spreadsheets, the frustration with tools that didn't fit—informs everything we build.
If you're running MCA operations on spreadsheets right now, I get it. I was there. It works until it doesn't.
If you're looking for something better, we built it for people exactly like you. Because we were people exactly like you.
That's the honest truth about why LendMatrix exists.
Want to see if LendMatrix fits your operation? We offer a 14-day trial with real onboarding support. No credit card required, no pressure. We'd rather you find the right fit—even if it's not us—than struggle with the wrong tool.