What happens after you send the application

It is a soft credit inquiry and leaves no mark on the owner's score. A lender may run a hard inquiry later, and only if an offer is taken forward — which is the point at which it is worth asking what is about to be run.

A funding specialist then analyses and compares what has come back and goes through it with you: what each offer costs in dollars, how it repays, what it asks for, and which of the six it actually is. Nothing obliges you to accept any of them, and the specialist's job at that moment is to make sure the one you take is the one that fits rather than the one that closes soonest.

Once an offer is accepted, funding follows on the programme's own timetable — one to two days on the short-term loan, twenty-four to forty-eight hours on working capital and the cash advance, twenty-four to seventy-two on the term loan and the line of credit.

The same specialist stays with the file afterwards. This office's own undertaking is that the relationship does not stop at the funding, and that later programmes worth knowing about are brought to you rather than waited for.