My largest customer insists on taking almost exactly 30 days for every invoice. This really annoys when the job being charged for is deemed urgent by the customer - work is urgent, paying a small company manyana. The FD thinks he's pulling a fast one. But he pays more than the customers who pay more promptly

my subcontracted government work for a certain large corporation with the framework contract for a high profile govt. dept. was just moved to 40 days instead of the previous 30 days.

Oh, no, it didn't cause me any issues at all that everyone's wages for that month were due about, ohhh, 10 days before the cheque came in. No, I **enjoy** fronting ten thousand pounds whilst a global megacorp sits on it's government money a bit longer. It makes me happy.

I work for a small company with several large customers. We do service/maintenance/troubleshooting work. We publish our hourly rates very clearly, but for some strange reason work done for our slow-paying customer always seems to take several hours longer.

FD's have some..odd.. ideas about payment timescales.

This is how it usually plays out..

Day 1 - Invoice Submitted. Marked due within 14 days. Schedule call to chase payment in 30 days.

Day 31 - 'no we havent paid, i'll write the cheque right now'

Day 38 - 'i wrote the cheque but forgot to do anything with it, i'll put it into an envelope right now'

Day 45 - 'i put it in an envelope but didnt post it, i'll add it to the outgoing mailbag now'

Day 51 - 'we only send mail in the mailbag on fridays'

Day 60 - Ta Da! cheque arrives second class post, postmarked as having been sent that wednesday. Amount has been 'accidentally' written incorrectly in the favor of the company.. so 3435 becomes 3345.

A typo during invoice entry onto SAP you say? how convenient, I'm looking at the SAP DB right now, and it seems oddly correct....