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For most small businesses, one piece of equipment carries most of the day's revenue. When it fails, the question isn't whether to fix it — it's whether the fix happens in hours, days or weeks. The difference between those three options is usually money, and the difference between money-now and money-in-three-weeks is often a short-term loan.
The cost of waiting
For a typical small café, an espresso machine out of service is around £400 of lost daily takings. For a delivery business, a van off the road is £600-£900 of lost daily revenue plus customer-relationship damage. For a commercial baker, an oven failure is the entire day's production. The financing decision is usually framed as "is the loan cost worth the immediate fix?" — for which the right input is the £-per-day of lost revenue, not the £-per-month of loan repayment.
The repair-vs-replace decision
Three quick checks before you finance:
- What did the supplier / repairer quote for the immediate fix? Get a written quote in £ with a date.
- Is this a recurring failure? If you've fixed the same thing three times this year, the next "fix" is really a partial replacement.
- What's the useful life of the alternative — replace now? Compare the all-in cost of fix + future failures vs replacement + warranty.
The equipment-replacement-finance article has the structured version of this decision.
Sizing the loan
For a repair, the loan is the repair quote + a 15% contingency (parts often turn out to need replacing once the unit is open). For a replacement, the loan is the unit cost + delivery + installation - any trade-in value the supplier offers for the old unit. Add VAT if your business reclaims it; the cashflow timing of the VAT reclaim is part of the repayment shape.
The same-day option
A short-term business loan from a fintech lender is typically: apply within 30 minutes, decision within 4 hours, funds by Faster Payments within 2 hours of approval. From "equipment failed" to "engineer paid" can be the same business day. That speed is sometimes the entire reason to finance — paying the engineer NOW gets a Monday or Tuesday repair window; waiting for a bank's response gets a Friday or following-week window.
For a quote on a specific repair or replacement, the business loans calculator handles £50-£5,000. Larger amounts (£5,000+) or asset-secured finance — talk to a specialist asset-finance house first; we can introduce you.