Single Invoice Factoring (Spot Factoring) Explained
One invoice, one fee, no contract. It costs more per invoice and it is often the correct choice anyway.
Traditional factoring agreements are whole-ledger: you commit all your invoices for a fixed term. Spot factoring inverts that. You sell a single invoice when you need to, and nothing else is committed.
The trade-off
- Costs more per invoice. The factor cannot amortise onboarding and credit work across a book of business.
- No monthly minimum. Nothing to pay in a month you do not use it.
- No termination fee, no notice period, no auto-renewal. The clauses that trap people do not exist here.
- Selective. You factor the slow-paying customer and keep the ones who pay on time.
Run the arithmetic over a year rather than per invoice. A whole-ledger deal at a lower rate with a monthly minimum often costs more annually than spot factoring used four times.
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When spot factoring is the right call
- Seasonal businesses with concentrated cash gaps
- One unusually large invoice on unusually long terms
- A single chronically slow customer inside an otherwise healthy ledger
- Testing a factor before committing to a full agreement
- Any business below the volume where minimums make whole-ledger sensible
Why some numbers on this site are blank
Every other factoring comparison site fills its rate columns. Most of those numbers are the advertised teaser rate, republished without checking what a real small operator is quoted. We publish a figure only when we have a primary source: the company's own published page, or a quote we obtained ourselves. Where we do not have one, the cell says Not published. That gap is honest and it closes edition by edition.