Games people play with cash flow
Relating to cash flow and payment terms, my company (outside of tech) has a particularly large client (rev &gt;$2B AUD, 10k employees worldwide) that has us on 45 days EOM, but accounts team won&#x27;t accept an invoice without a ref#, which are given by the &quot;receipting team&quot; after site confirms work is completed<p>The mysterious &quot;receipting team&quot; is not in the main office, and has no phone number or even names listed, emails are never directly replied to, instead site contacts will call to relay questions&#x2F;answers from them, ref# come from an automated do-not-reply email. They will quite often be &quot;backlogged&quot; and fail to send a ref# before the the end of the month, and suddenly will be cleared up on the 1st of the month.<p>We&#x27;ve had jobs that finished in the first week of a month, been ignored for 25 days, received a ref# with an apology for the delay on the 1st of the following month, get paid 45 days end of <i>that</i> month. So up to 100 days from completing work to getting paid. All our accounts are POS, 7 days EOM, or 30 days EOM, and must be paid on time or we lose supply. So to do a job with $100k of materials and wages for them, we have to have $100k spare cash for up to 60-100 days<p>It&#x27;s not a cashflow problem, they&#x27;re sitting on reserves and we&#x27;re a blip on their radar, less than 1&#x2F;10th of a percent of their outgoings<p>So we quote them outrageously high, and they never blink. I&#x27;ve told them some jobs would be up to 50% less if they paid quicker, and they&#x27;ve outright said they&#x27;d rather hold the cash and pay more. For a sense of scale we&#x27;ve invoiced them about $500k a year for the last few years, they&#x27;ve told me to clear out a couple weeks for two jobs that are nearly that much <i>each</i>, in February and April this year. I can&#x27;t figure out who&#x27;s getting the bad deal, them or me, I keep assuming they must have some massive upside I&#x27;m not seeing ¯\_(ツ)_&#x2F;¯