True revenue (sometimes called real or adjusted revenue) is a merchant’s genuine sales volume for the month after everything that isn’t sales has been removed from gross deposits. It’s the number that should drive advance sizing — because funding a percentage of inflated deposits is how a merchant gets stacked into an advance they can’t hold.
What gets stripped out
- Transfers between the merchant’s own accounts and self-Zelle / self-transfers.
- Reversed and returned round-trips — a debit and its matching credit that net to zero.
- Prior MCA advances and loan disbursals — funder money in, not earned revenue.
- One-off, non-recurring credits that don’t reflect ongoing sales.
The gap between gross deposits and true revenue is often large. Counting a $30,000 transfer from the merchant’s savings account as revenue can turn a $60,000/month file into a $90,000/month file on paper — and an advance sized to the inflated number is the one that defaults.
How we compute it: the engine classifies each credit and excludes transfers, self-payments, reversals and known-funder disbursals from revenue, recording which rule fired on every excluded row. Total deposits and deposit count are still reported untouched, so you always see both the gross and the true number.
Detecting prior-funder disbursals is also the first half of finding an existing MCA position.