Your MCA lender probably overcharged you
Here's a number that should bother you: the average MCA overpayment we've found is around $12,000. That's money that left your bank account and shouldn't have.
Most business owners don't catch it. The reason is mechanical. MCA lenders pull daily ACH debits from your account, sometimes twice a day, and the amounts shift. One day it's $487. The next it's $512. Over six months, you've made 120+ individual payments, and nobody is sitting there with a calculator checking whether the running total crossed the payoff line.
The lender knows exactly where the balance stands. You don't. That asymmetry is where the overcharges live.
How daily debits hide the math
An MCA isn't a loan. There's no fixed monthly payment and no amortization schedule. Instead, the lender buys your future receivables at a discount, then collects a percentage of your daily sales. The factor rate determines the total payback, but the daily collection amount floats.
This means there's no statement that says "payment 87 of 120." You get debits showing up in your bank feed with vague descriptions. Sometimes the merchant name on the transaction doesn't even match the company you signed with.
The payoff total on a $50,000 advance at a 1.4 factor rate is $70,000. But when the lender has pulled $71,200 out of your account and the debits keep coming, you'd only know that if you tracked every single withdrawal against the agreement terms. Most people don't.
What overpayment actually looks like
It's rarely one big charge. It's death by a thousand cuts — small overages spread across weeks or months. Maybe the lender continued pulling payments for nine days after you hit the payoff amount. At $500/day, that's $4,500 they weren't entitled to.
Or the factor rate in the agreement says 1.35, but when you add up every debit, the effective rate works out to 1.48. That gap on a $30,000 advance is $3,900.
These aren't hypothetical numbers. This is what we see when business owners finally sit down and reconcile their accounts.
What you can do about it
Pull your bank statements for the period the MCA was active. Every statement, not just the most recent one. Export the transactions if your bank allows it.
Add up every debit from the MCA lender. Compare that total against the payoff amount in your agreement (advance amount multiplied by the factor rate). If you've paid more than that number, you've overpaid.
If you're currently in an active MCA, start tracking now. The longer you wait, the harder it gets to untangle which transactions belong to which agreement, especially if you have multiple MCAs stacked.
A reconciliation letter, sent to the lender with your documented payment total, puts them on notice. They have to respond. If your numbers show an overpayment, that letter is the beginning of getting your money back.