MCA Stipulation Management: How to Keep Approved Deals Moving
A practical MCA stipulation management workflow for organizing conditions, assigning follow-up, validating documents, and moving approved deals toward contracts and funding.
Turn the approval into a working checklist
Record the approved terms, expiration or review timing provided by the funder, and every condition attached to the offer. Separate merchant-facing requests from internal tasks and funder-side items. Each stip should have a plain-language label, an owner, a due date, and a status such as requested, received, under review, accepted, or needs replacement. A single “docs pending” stage is too vague to tell anyone what to do next.
Request only what the current offer requires
Before contacting the merchant, confirm which conditions belong to the selected offer and whether the funder has specific format, recency, or signature requirements. Group the requests into one understandable message when possible. Explain what is needed, why it is needed, and how to provide it. Sending new one-off requests throughout the day creates confusion and makes it harder to tell whether the package is actually complete.
Keep documents attached to the condition
A file arriving by email should not become an unlabeled attachment that somebody has to interpret later. Connect each document to the relevant stip, record when it arrived, and retain the version being reviewed. If a document is rejected, note the reason and reopen the same condition rather than creating a second, competing request. That gives the rep a clean answer when the merchant asks what is still outstanding.
Validate before sending the package back
Received does not mean ready. Check that names and business details match the application, all pages are present, dates fall within the requested period, signatures are complete where required, and scans are readable. Route exceptions to a person instead of trying to automate judgment. A short internal review prevents avoidable back-and-forth with the funder and keeps the merchant from being asked for the same item twice.
Give follow-up a cadence and an owner
Assign one person to coordinate the open list, even when several teammates handle individual tasks. Use reminders based on the condition and deal timing, not a generic daily chase. Merchant follow-up, internal review, and funder confirmation are different actions and should be tracked separately. When an offer changes, pause the old checklist, record why, and build the new list from the current terms.
Manage the exceptions, not just the pipeline
Review approved deals with overdue requests, received documents waiting on validation, rejected items without a replacement request, conditions with no owner, and complete packages awaiting a funder response. This exception queue tells operations where intervention matters. When the deal funds or closes another way, record the outcome and close the remaining tasks so stale stipulations do not keep generating noise.