The honest timeline
Monday application, clean statements to hand: funded Wednesday or Thursday. Achievable.
Wednesday application: Friday is possible but depends on your bank's clearing times, not the funder's.
Thursday or Friday: you are funding next week's payroll, not this one. Better to know that now and make other arrangements than to wait on a transfer that will not arrive.
What to have ready before you start
Six months of business bank statements as PDFs. This is the whole game — every hour spent finding these is an hour off the timeline.
Your average monthly deposits, as a real number.
How much you actually need. Not a round number chosen for comfort: shortfalls funded precisely cost less than shortfalls funded generously.
A word about cost, given the circumstances
Emergency funding is not cheap, and pressure is where people accept the first offer rather than the best one. A $30,000 advance at 1.4 costs $12,000 more than the same advance at 1.2.
Compare on the total dollar figure, not the daily payment. A lower daily payment over a longer term frequently costs more in total, and it is the number most often quoted precisely because it sounds smaller.
If a funder will not tell you the total repayment in dollars, that is information about the funder.
If the gap keeps recurring
A payroll shortfall that happens more than once is a cash-flow timing problem, not a funding problem. A line of credit is built for it — you draw when the gap opens and repay when the money lands, paying interest only on what you use.
It takes longer to set up and is worth doing before the next emergency rather than during it.