A landscaper in the Northeast, a beach-town restaurant, a retailer whose year is decided in November and December — seasonal businesses share a cash-flow problem no averaging can fix: obligations arrive monthly, revenue doesn't. The dangerous month isn't the slow one; it's the strong month that convinces you to size commitments the slow months can't carry.
The average-month illusion
Divide annual revenue by twelve and you get a number that describes no month you will actually live through. A business doing $600K a year might see $90K Julys and $20K Februarys. Any fixed obligation — rent, subscriptions, a fixed payment on capital — is a February problem, because February is when a fixed number meets a small denominator.
The planning rule that follows: size every fixed commitment against your trough months, and let the peak months build the buffer. If a commitment only works at the average, it doesn't work.
Match the obligation's shape to the revenue's shape
This is the real argument for percentage-based remittance in seasonal businesses. Capital that collects a fixed percentage of each day's card settlement takes more when you're busy and less when you're not — the obligation inherits your seasonality automatically. Capital that debits a fixed amount from your bank account on a schedule ignores your seasonality entirely, and a slow week can turn it into an overdraft cascade.
The estimated delivery period on a percentage-remitted advance stretches through an off-season rather than breaking: slower sales mean smaller remittances over more days, not a missed payment event. For a business whose revenue breathes, that difference is worth more than a modest difference in rate.
Time the capital to the ramp, not the peak
The best moment for a seasonal business to take capital is before the ramp: inventory, hiring, and repairs get funded ahead of the season, and delivery happens out of peak-season settlement, when a percentage of daily sales is at its largest and least painful. Taking capital at the end of the season — to cover the tail — means delivering through the trough instead. Same product, opposite experience.
Sizing follows the same logic: an advance around half a month of peak-season card volume delivers comfortably; one sized like the peak will last forever is how businesses arrive at the off-season still carrying obligations shaped for July.
The off-season checklist
Know your true monthly fixed costs — the number that must exist in your worst month. Bank the buffer during the peak deliberately, as a transfer with a name, not as whatever's left. Prefer obligations that flex with revenue over obligations that don't. And never stack advances to survive a season: if the season's math doesn't support the first advance, a second one at worse terms is arithmetic moving in the wrong direction.
Seasonality isn't a defect to apologise for in an application — for a card-revenue business it's right there in the settlement history, and capital can be priced on it and collected in its shape. That's how Lombard structures an advance: a percentage of each day's settlement, sized to what your volume supports, with the estimate allowed to breathe.