You Should Never Pay Your Supplier Late … Unless …

You can confirm that paying your supplier late is actually the right thing to do in the situation at hand.

There’s a reason that SI has been saying since day one that you should never pay a supplier late, and stands by that as a general rule, but every rule has an exception, and since there is a lot of economic stress as a result of the trade war (and other global political messes), and there will be times where smaller companies cannot always pay every invoice on time to the dot, SI is going to repeat the one, and only one, time you can pay a supplier late — and that’s when, and only when the particular circumstance at hand is such that it hurts the supplier less than it hurts you.

Furthermore, this isn’t a carte blanche to delay paying the invoice indefinitely, it’s special permission to avoid paying just until the funds come in to pay it. If you’re short because you’re waiting for your biggest customer to pay their large invoice, and you can’t pay everyone, then you can delay the invoices where it will hurt the suppliers the least to delay … but ONLY until the payment comes in.

In other words, if you have 1M in invoices, but only 800K, and you have invoices to (a) Mom and Pop’s Catering Services for the large event you just held; (b) the local meeting space you use every month; (c) the contingent staffing provider for seasonal workers you need; and (d) Big Computer Co for your 500L software renewal, where they won’t notice you’re late for at least 30 days, and they’ll just charge you 6% annual interest if they know you can pay late. So, who do you pay late? The answer should be obvious — (d).

Mom and Pop’s are probably surviving invoice to invoice, and any late payment seriously hurts their business. The contingent staffing provider might be able to afford it, but you don’t want to risk it as you need their staff and you can’t risk them having to lay those staff off because of cashflow issues. The local meeting space could probably swing at least a partial late payment, but they’re local and you need the preferred customer status they’ll give you as local if you pay on time. On the other hand, Microsoft has about 126 Billion in cash and equivalents, and can afford the late payment. And if you have to pay a 0.5% penalty, it’s way less than the heartache your other suppliers could experience if you don’t pay on time.

Remember, there are two reasons you always want to pay your suppliers on time. The first is to keep them financially sound. The second is to reduce your end to end supply chain cost. Just like you, your suppliers depend on your business and need that cash to buy raw materials, fund overhead costs, and, most importantly, pay their workers. If the supplier has to borrow money to buy those raw materials, fund overhead, or pay workers, it’s going to cost that supplier — and if their credit rating is less than yours, they’re not going to get a good rate — and, in fact, they might get a very bad rate of 20% or more … a lot less than the 6% you might be charged by Microsoft. And you can guess what’s going to happen down the road if they have to borrow at 20% interest for 3 months. That’s right, your costs are going up 5% on renewal. (And if the supplier has to layoff, and then bring people back later due to cash flow, that costs the, and you, even more.)

And what if a few days turns into a few weeks and then a few months and the supplier goes out of business just before they ship your big batch of products that take two months to make, then you’re not only out a supplier, you’re out products that you planned, which puts you out revenue, which puts you in an even worse situation.

So while it is sometimes okay to pay a supplier late if the situation is such that it hurts them less than it hurts you, it’s not okay to cart blanche pay them late on every invoice or delay payment even a day more than necessary.

So as a general rule, never pay a supplier late.