Capitalise is an FCA regulated platform dedicated to UK businesses. Our mission is to help businesses to take control of their financial health. We support business owners by providing easy way to access over 100 lenders and compare their loan products. Our advanced platform makes intelligent matches and ranks lenders, based on their past successes, to help businesses select the best funding solution.

Capitalise also enables businesses to check their own Experian business credit score to better understand their financial health. Plus businesses can check the credit profiles of the companies they work with to reduce risk.

If you're looking for a business term loan, repayments will be made monthly across the term, for example over 12, months, or 24 months, etc. To determine how much your business can borrow, lenders will consider some of the following:

• Whether your business makes a profit.
• Your last year's turnover - typically you can expect to borrow 25% of your annual turnover.
• If your cash flow covers the business repayments by at least double. 

For example, if your business took a £120,000 loan for 2 years then it would need to repay £5,000 plus interest every month. This means that your business would need to generate significantly more than £5,000 each month in cash to comfortably afford that loan. This is what lenders are looking at when it comes to affordability.

When considering how much you can borrow, lenders want to see that this repayment will come from free cash flow in your business, coming after your necessary expenses and existing financial obligations. This will include any existing repayments, dividends or periodic payments you might have.
Once you have deduced these expenses from your existing cash flow, it should give you an idea of how much you can comfortably and realistically borrow. Our business term loan calculator can help you calculate how much you might be able to borrow within this budget.
 

When you go beyond getting a quote and actually apply for funding, a lender will do something called a hard search of your business credit profile. Too many of these hard credit searches in a short space of time can have a negative impact on your business credit score. This can happen if you’re not entirely sure what kind of funding is the best fit for your business so you cast a wide net with lots of applications.

When you search for funding through Capitalise, you fill in one application form and we send that on to lenders for you. We keep the number of hard searches to a minimum by making sure we only send your application to the lenders most likely to approve your business for funding. Usually this is between two and four of the carefully selected lenders we work with.

The interest rates you can get with a business loan will depend on a variety of factors, one of the most important being your business credit score. Having a good business credit score means that you will be able to access cheaper interest rates, saving you significant amounts of money in the long term. 

When you check your eligibility with Capitalise, we'll show you the typical interest rates offered for each lender, so you can get an idea of what rates will be available for that specific lending product. 

Each lender will specialise in different products and sometimes specific business sectors, so which lenders you should apply to will depend on what you need to use the loan for and whether you meet their individual criteria. When you check your eligibility with Capitalise, we'll consider the information provided such as: 

• Your business credit score
• Your business sector 
• What you intend to use the loan for 
• Whether you have or want to use any assets as security 

We'll then match you with 4 lenders most likely to approve you for a loan out of our panel of 100+ UK lenders. With this information, you'll know which lenders to apply to, which funding products are best suited and how much you could borrow. You'll also be able to speak with our funding specialists to help put your application together and apply for funding. 

Your repayments will depend on the size of the loan, the length of the term, and interest rate offered. The Business Loan Calculator will allow you to see how these different factors impact how much your monthly repayments will be, and how much your total cost of the loan will be.

You can often repay a business loan early. If you can afford to do so, it can be a wise decision as it allows you to save money on interest. 

However, it's important to first check the details of your loan agreement. Some lenders may charge fees for paying off loans early. You should check if the interest savings are worth the penalty.