Lending
You pay the factory before the goods ship. The retailer pays you 90 or 120 days after they land. That gap is not a sign of a badly run business, it is how UAE distribution works, and it gets wider every time you win something bigger.
You pay the factory before the goods ship. The retailer pays you 90 or 120 days after they land. That gap is not a sign of a badly run business, it is how UAE distribution works, and it gets wider every time you win something bigger.
Most traders cover it out of their own cash, which quietly caps the business at whatever their own cash can carry. This is about the other options, when each of them fits, and what a lender is actually looking at.
Because you sit between two parties who both pay on their own terms, and neither of them is you.
Suppliers abroad want payment at or before shipment, often by telegraphic transfer or letter of credit. Then the goods spend weeks in transit and more time in a warehouse. Only after that does your customer take delivery, and only then does their payment clock start. A supermarket chain, a contractor or a government buyer will run 90 to 120 days as standard.
Add it up and the money can be out of the business for four or five months on a single cycle. Nothing is wrong. You are simply funding somebody else's working capital with your own.
Because the cost lands immediately and the revenue does not.
A larger purchase order means a larger payment to the supplier, more freight, more duty, more warehousing. All of it hits before the customer has taken a single unit. The order that proves the business is working is also the order most likely to break its cash position.
This is the moment most traders discover the ceiling. The usual response is to order less than the customer asked for, which protects cash this month and hands the rest of the contract to a competitor.
Four things get used, and they solve different problems. Matching the product to the actual gap matters more than the headline cost.
Purchase order finance. Funds the cost of goods against a confirmed order, before you have anything to invoice. Useful when the problem is that you cannot afford to fulfil what you have already won.
Invoice discounting, sometimes called receivables finance. Releases cash against invoices you have already raised, so you do not wait out the customer's payment terms. Useful when the goods are delivered and the money is simply not in yet.
Supplier or payable finance. A lender pays your supplier, and you repay later. Useful when the supplier will not extend terms but your own customers are reliable.
A revolving working capital line. A limit you draw on and repay as cycles turn, rather than a lump sum. Useful when the gap is continuous rather than tied to one order.
The mistake worth avoiding is applying for a term loan because it is the product you have heard of. A term loan against a receivables problem reads as a weak file even when the business behind it is strong.
Less about property than most owners expect, and more about the flow of the business.
They want to see revenue that appears in the bank statements rather than only in the accounts. They look at who your customers are, because a receivable from a national retailer is not the same risk as one from a small reseller. They look at how long you have been trading, how concentrated your customer base is, and whether cheques have bounced.
What matters most is that the lender can see the cycle clearly: goods in, goods out, money in. A trading business that can evidence that cycle is financeable even without assets to pledge, and that is the part that surprises people who have only ever spoken to a bank.
Usually because the file went to a lender whose policy it never fitted.
Every lender writes a different book. Some will not lend under a certain turnover, some want two or three years of history, some do not write general trading at all, and some will not price a receivable from a customer they cannot verify. A profitable, well-run trader can miss a line in a policy it was never shown.
The other common reason is product mismatch, described above. Neither has anything to do with the quality of the business, and neither is fixed by trying again with the same file.
Before applying, not after. A formal application leaves a record, and a scattergun approach to several lenders in a short window is a pattern credit teams can see.
GrowthIQ is a UAE SME credit orchestration platform. One application is assessed against codified lender credit policies, lenders whose criteria you do not meet are excluded, and what remains is ranked by fit. We do the matching, not the lending. The initial assessment runs without unnecessarily affecting the owner's AECB profile.
There is no upfront fee. A success fee applies only if financing is disbursed.
A manufacturer pays for materials, freight and labour up front, then waits 60 to 100 days to be paid for what it made. The bigger the order, the longer the money is out and the more of it there is.
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