When businesses seek out financing to make essential equipment purchases, credit always comes into play. If your company has challenged credit, you could quickly see your financing options dry up, putting your business in a tough situation.
If this equipment is essential to your operations and/or your plans for growth, credit denials could threaten the future of your business. Fortunately, specialized equipment financing options offer flexibility to serve challenged credit accounts. Here’s a look at how an equipment finance agreement (EFA) might allow your business to overcome its credit limitations.
Simplifying the Application Process
At a traditional lender, the application process for any type of financing can be lengthy, requiring a lot of documentation and review to determine credit-worthiness. For businesses with challenged credit, this review process can take weeks and involve extensive scrutiny of finances before leading to the same result: an application denial due to poor credit.
Even worse, most traditional lenders don’t have options to provide funding to businesses attempting to overcome these credit challenges. However, specialized equipment financing companies are able to customize these services to meet your specific needs, all while streamlining applications and approvals. Often they can be completed in a single business day—sometimes as little as four hours.
The quick decisions offered by EFA lenders can incentivize applications from credit-challenged clients who might otherwise be discouraged from a lengthy, frustrating approval process.
Serving Businesses Through a “Challenged Credit Program”
To ensure equipment financing is available to the widest range of clients possible, Centra has created a number of flexible financing programs that cater to common business challenges. This includes our Challenged Credit Program, which is specifically set up to support equipment financing for businesses with less-than-perfect credit.
If you’ve been denied by other lenders or are worried about the limitations created by your current credit, contact us to learn more about this financing program, and how we’re able to provide funding for businesses in need of specialized help.
In addition to the Challenged Credit Program, other specialized financing programs may offer compelling terms and qualification criteria for businesses to meet, giving them more ways to receive approval for equipment financing. If you’ve had bad experiences with traditional lenders or are worried about limitations created by your financial outlook, you have multiple options to overcome those obstacles.
Using Equipment as Collateral
One way an EFA can serve companies with challenged credit is through the use of your purchased equipment as collateral. Even for a business with challenged credit and limited assets to serve as collateral, the equipment you purchase can become collateral that enables financing approval for your company.
This is possible because an EFA allows your business to assume ownership of equipment at the start of your financing agreement—not at the end. Without this ownership, your business would be unable to use equipment as collateral in these agreements. The structure of an EFA makes this possible, overcoming approval challenges that can lead to application denials from other lenders.
While equipment ownership solves the collateral problem for many businesses, it also allows businesses to claim depreciation of that equipment off of their taxes, which provides another fringe benefit to the client’s financial outlook.
Flexible Financing to Expand Your Options
Whether your business makes use of the Challenged Credit Program or other financing program options, equipment financing gives your business flexibility. It allows you to choose the alternative that meets your financing needs—and that you qualify for, given your credit and other considerations.
Challenged credit shouldn’t make it impossible for businesses to get the funding they need to keep moving forward and building a successful operation. Find out if Centra’s financing options are a fit for your business. Apply for funding today.
