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A merchant cash advance is an up-front lump sum that the business repays out of its incoming sales, plus a fixed fee. In Layer you model an MCA in two parts: create the loan (fully disbursed up front), then record repayments as they are withheld from sales.
Creating an advance that is already partially repaid, without the full repayment history? Pass reported_balance instead of proceeds when creating the loan. See Backfilling existing loans.

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Step 1: Create the loan

Create a loan with loan_type set to MCA, and disburse the full advance immediately by including a single DISBURSEMENT proceed for the whole amount. Set an external_id so you can reference the loan later without storing Layer’s IDs. The fee_percentage is the fixed fee expressed as a percentage (for example, "15" for a 15% fee on a $20,000 advance).
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Step 2: Record repayments

MCA repayments are typically withheld from the business’s incoming sales, so each repayment reduces the outstanding principal and includes a portion of the fee. Each repayment is a loan payment split into PRINCIPAL and FEE. For MCAs you can omit the payment’s splits and Layer derives them from the loan’s fee_percentage (principal = amount / (1 + fee_percentage / 100), fee = remainder); provide explicit splits to override. How you create those loan payments depends on the granularity of your data.

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If you have payment-level granularity

If you know how much was withheld for each individual sale, attach the repayment to that invoice payment as a LOAN_REPAYMENT additional fee when you record the payment. Layer creates the linked loan payment and ties the two together. In the example below, a customer pays a $1,150.00 invoice and the MCA provider withholds $150.00 of it to repay the advance, so the business nets $1,000.00. Because the loan is an MCA, splits are omitted and Layer derives the principal and fee from the loan’s fee_percentage.
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If you have payout-level granularity

If you only know repayment totals at the payout level, create the loan payment(s) directly with Create a loan payment, then reference them when you create the payout they were deducted from. First, create the loan payment with an external_id you can reference. As above, splits are omitted so Layer derives the principal and fee from the loan’s fee_percentage:
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Then reference the loan payment(s) in the payout they were deducted from via loan_payments. The MCA repayment reduces the amount deposited: here $5,000.00 of sales were collected and $1,150.00 was withheld for the advance, so paid_out_amount is $3,850.00.
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