Checking a Customer Before You Need To
Five checks, none of which takes more than ten minutes, all of which are awkward once the work has started.
Yourswho controls this stretch
Checking a customer takes about half an hour, costs nothing, and is nearly impossible to do gracefully once you have started work.
The commercial boundary in “Checking a Customer Before You Need To” is clearer when estimated work, recorded time and authorised scope can be compared. For teams researching user activity monitoring, visit the official platform page can add that operational context, but purchase terms and payment obligations should remain in the signed agreement.
Five checks, in the order of how much they tell you per minute spent.
Additional context for “Checking a Customer Before You Need To” is available through PayPal invoicing resources. A sound review separates the work record, invoice, approval and final settlement.
One: do they pay anybody on time
The most useful question and the one most often skipped. Other suppliers know, trade bodies sometimes know, and in some jurisdictions large companies must publish their own payment performance.
| Check | Costs you | Tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Ask how they pay | One line in an email | Whether the process is settled |
| Ask another supplier | A short conversation | How it works in practice |
| Look at the public record | Twenty minutes | Size, filings, group structure |
| Size the job against your year | Nothing | What a failure would do to you |
| Ask who approves invoices | One line | Whether anybody is accountable |
Where that reporting exists it is free, public and specific, and it is the single best predictor available.
Two: who are they, exactly
Which legal entity is engaging you. A group may have a dozen, and the one your contact works for may not be the one that pays.
Getting the wrong entity on the invoice is a cause of non-payment that has nothing to do with willingness.
Three: what does the public record say
Filed accounts, filing history, whether returns are late, whether there are charges registered, whether the entity is recently incorporated.
None of it is conclusive and all of it is cheap.
Four: how big is this relative to you
A job worth a month of your capacity to a customer for whom it is a rounding error is a different risk from one that matters to both sides.
Asymmetry of size is the whole subject of this collection, and it is measurable before you agree.
Five: how do they actually pay
Terms, cycle, whether an order is needed, which system, who approves. Four questions to one person in their accounts function.
They answer freely before the relationship exists and guardedly afterwards.
What the checks cannot tell you
Whether they will pay you. A customer with a clean record and an excellent reputation can be slow for reasons that have nothing to do with you.
The checks move the odds; they do not settle anything.
When to do them
Before quoting, not after. A price that reflects payment risk has to be set before the price is given.
Who to ask
For the payment questions, their accounts payable. For the commercial ones, the public record. For the reputation, other suppliers.
None of the three requires permission from your contact.
The check that feels rude
Asking a new customer how they pay. It feels like distrust and it is read as professionalism, because every supplier who has been burned asks it.
Phrased as "so I can set this up correctly at my end", it is simply administration.
What to do with a bad answer
Price it, structure it, or decline it. A customer who is known to pay at ninety days is not necessarily a customer to refuse — they are a customer to quote differently and to stage.
Knowing is the whole point. The decision afterwards is commercial.
What a good answer sounds like
Asked how they pay, a well-run buyer answers in specifics without hesitating: thirty days from invoice date, runs on the 15th and the last working day, invoices to a named address, purchase order required, onboarding takes about a fortnight. Nobody has to find out; the person you asked knows, because suppliers ask regularly and the answer is settled.
A poor answer is vague in a particular way — "we're usually pretty good", "I'd have to check with finance", "it depends" — and it is vague because the process is either unsettled or unflattering.
Neither answer tells you whether this buyer will pay. What they tell you is whether getting paid will involve navigation. Price accordingly, start onboarding immediately if there is any, and do not plan the job's cash on the optimistic reading of an evasive reply.
Checking somebody you already work for
The checks are described here as something done before a first order, which is when they are cheapest. They are also worth repeating on existing customers, and almost nobody does it.
A customer that paid reliably for two years can change: new ownership, a new finance director, a bank facility withdrawn, a parent company in difficulty. The supplier usually learns about it from the payments rather than from the news, and by then it has three invoices outstanding instead of one.
An annual look at the public record for your five largest customers takes under an hour and occasionally changes a decision about taking a large job. It is the same work as the initial check, applied to the accounts where the exposure is largest rather than the ones where the relationship is newest.
The record worth keeping
Five lines per customer: entity, terms, order required, who approves, how they have actually paid.
Kept for a year, it tells you more about your own cash than any forecast.