Cut-Offs, and the Day You Send It

The two dates that matter

The cut-off: the last day an approved invoice can enter a run. The run itself: the day money leaves.

Both are fixed, both are known internally, and both will be told to you if you ask.

Why the cut-off matters more

Because approval takes time of its own. An invoice sent two days before the cut-off will not be approved in time, so the effective deadline is earlier than the stated one.

Sending a week before is the practical rule.

Finding them out

One question to accounts payable: when are your payment runs, and when is the cut-off for approval.

It is routine, it is answered immediately, and almost no small supplier asks it.

Invoicing at month end

The worst habit available. Everybody invoices then, approvals queue, and your invoice joins a pile at exactly the busiest moment.

Invoicing on completion, whenever that falls, is both faster and smoother.

Invoicing immediately

The rule that costs nothing. The day the work is delivered, or the day the stage completes.

Each day of delay is a day added to the end, and it is the one part of the timeline you own entirely.

The end of their financial year

Approvals slow, budgets close, and new spend is scrutinised. Occasionally the opposite: budgets must be spent before they lapse.

Knowing which applies is worth a question to your contact.

Holidays

A fortnight in summer or at the year's end can swallow an approval chain entirely, because one named approver is away and nobody is delegated.

Invoicing before a known absence, rather than during it, is free.

Your own cycle

Many small suppliers invoice monthly out of habit, even for work completed on the 3rd.

That habit adds up to four weeks to every invoice, for no reason other than administrative convenience.

What to record

Per customer: cut-off, run dates, and any period to avoid. Three fields.

With them, you can tell a customer when they will actually pay before they know themselves, which is a surprisingly strong position.

The gap the two dates create

Terms describe a period; the run describes the dates on which money actually leaves. Between them sits a gap that belongs to nobody and is invisible from outside.

An invoice approved two days after a monthly run waits until the next one, which can add a month to a thirty-day term without anything having gone wrong. Nobody has been slow, no policy has been broken, and the supplier experiences it as a late payment.

Knowing the run dates converts that from a mystery into arithmetic. It also tells you which delays are worth chasing: a week lost inside an approval chain is sometimes recoverable, while a month lost to a missed run almost never is.

Working backwards from the run

Once the dates are known, the useful calculation runs in reverse: for an invoice to be paid on a given run, it must be approved by the cut-off; to be approved by then it must be matched and receipted; to be matched it must have arrived with the right reference some days before that.

Counting those steps backwards gives a submission date, and it is usually earlier than suppliers expect.

This is the practical content of the whole note. The supplier who sends an invoice on the last day of the month because that is when their own bookkeeping happens is making a decision about their own convenience that costs real weeks. The same invoice sent four days earlier catches a run it would otherwise miss.

Neither the terms nor the relationship changed. Only the date of sending did, and it is the one input in this entire process that costs nothing to adjust.

What to do when the dates are not disclosed

Some buyers will not say when their runs are, usually because nobody has been asked before rather than as policy. The dates are still discoverable: record when each payment actually lands, across four or five invoices, and the pattern appears on its own.

Payments clustering around the same two dates each month is a run schedule, observed rather than given. It is sufficient for planning, and it costs nothing beyond noting a date you already have.

The cycle at your own end

The buyer's calendar is only half of it. A supplier who raises invoices once a month, on a day chosen years ago for convenience, is adding its own delay to every job and has usually stopped noticing.

Invoicing when the work is done, rather than when the bookkeeping is scheduled, is free and immediate. For a supplier billing monthly against buyers who run payments fortnightly, moving the invoicing day can shorten every payment in the year by a fortnight without a single conversation.

The calculation worth doing once

Average days from work completed to invoice sent, across a year. For many small businesses it is between seven and twenty.

That number is free money, and it is entirely in your hands.