Who to Ask, and About What
Four people stand between you and the money. Each can answer exactly one kind of question, and asking the wrong one wastes the asking.
Sharedwho controls this stretch
Four people, and the one question each can actually answer
Stops you: They can see everything and will tell you; they cannot make anybody approve it.
Stops you: They can do two things inside the building and cannot pay you.
Stops you: Contacting them directly goes around your contact and is remembered.
Stops you: Available once, expensive, and only after the first three have been tried and recorded.
Four people, and only two of them can be asked anything useful. Asking the wrong one produces a true and useless answer, and asking the fourth early spends the only escalation you have. One supplier's own map, not a statement about anybody.
Four people stand between a sent invoice and money in your account. Each can answer one kind of question. Asking any of them the wrong question produces a reply that is true, polite and useless.
The practical point in “Who to Ask, and About What” is that getting paid depends on records somebody can explain. A small team considering view the current product information for timesheet reminder can organise time and project evidence before invoicing, with transparent settings, proportionate collection and a visible correction route.
Knowing which is which is most of the skill in chasing.
Additional context for “Who to Ask, and About What” is available through Sage invoice glossary. A sound review separates the work record, invoice, approval and final settlement.
Accounts payable
Can tell you whether it arrived, whether it matched, whether it is approved, and which run it is in.
Cannot make anybody approve it, cannot change terms, and cannot pay early. Ask them about status, never about speed.
Your contact
Can confirm the work was received inside the system, can nudge an approver, and can explain what is going on commercially.
Cannot pay you and usually cannot see the queue. Ask them for actions, not for information about process.
The approver
Can release it, and is not reachable. Contacting them directly bypasses your contact and is remembered by both.
Ask them nothing; ask your contact to ask them.
Your contact's manager
Can make it happen, once, as an escalation. Expensive, available, and best used after the other three have been exhausted and recorded.
The question that fits each
Status to accounts payable. Receipting and nudging to your contact. Resolution to the manager, once.
Three channels, three registers, no overlap.
The mistake that costs most
Asking your contact when you will be paid. They do not know, cannot find out easily, and are now carrying your cash problem.
Repeated, it changes what the relationship is about.
The mistake that costs second most
Asking accounts payable to hurry. It is the one thing they cannot do, and it converts a helpful administrative relationship into a defensive one.
Getting the names
At the start, from your contact: who handles invoices. One question, asked when nothing is wrong.
A name obtained in month one is worth a great deal in month three.
When the contact has left
The commonest reason an old invoice becomes unanswerable. Nobody left knows the work, and only the paperwork speaks.
Accounts payable can usually say who inherited the budget.
Escalating to the manager
One message, factual, with dates: sent on this date, matched on this date, approved, not scheduled, due a month ago.
No adjectives. The dates do the work.
Matching the question to the function
Each of the four can answer one kind of question and no others, and most wasted chasing is the right question posed to the wrong function.
Accounts payable can say whether an invoice arrived, whether it matched, where it is and whether a payment date exists. They cannot make it move.
Your contact can get a receipt entered, an order amended or an approver nudged. They cannot tell you anything reliable about dates.
The approver can approve. They usually do not know an invoice is waiting until somebody tells them.
Your contact's manager can reorder other people's priorities, which is why that call is held in reserve rather than used for information.
Getting the names before you need them
All of this presumes knowing who the four people are, and the moment to find out is at the start of the job rather than in the sixth week of a late payment.
One question when the order arrives — who should the invoice go to, and who approves it — produces both names at a point when asking is ordinary administration. Asked during a chase, the same question reads as the beginning of an escalation.
It is also worth recording them against the customer rather than in a message thread, because the information has a short life. Contacts move, accounts payable restructures, approval thresholds change, and a supplier reconstructing the chain from an email of eight months ago is frequently writing to somebody who left.
Suppliers who keep this list spend their chasing on asking. Suppliers who do not spend most of it on finding out whom to ask, which is the part that takes the weeks.
The pattern of a chase that works
Nearly every effective sequence runs in the same order, outward from the cheapest function to the most expensive.
Accounts payable first, to establish facts: has it arrived, has it matched, is there a date. Then the contact, with whatever specific thing the facts identified — a receipt, an amendment, a nudge. Then the approver, by name, only if the hold is a signature. Then, rarely, upwards.
Suppliers who reverse the order spend their most expensive asks on questions the cheapest function would have answered for free, and arrive at the real problem with nothing left to spend.
What never helps
Copying everybody at once. It forces each recipient to consider how they look to the others, and the usual result is that nobody acts and somebody is annoyed.