Whose Clock Each Day Belongs To
Split the wait by who owned each day and most of it turns out to be unreachable. The useful part is the fraction that was shared.
Theirswho controls this stretch
One invoice, seventy-one days, split by who owned each stretch
Work finished on the 2nd; invoice raised on the 8th, for no reason except habit.
A transposed digit in the order number; nobody was notified, including them.
Nobody had marked the work as received; one message fixed it.
Three signatures, one approver on leave, no delegation in place.
Approved on the 3rd; runs are on the 1st.
A question I could answer in ten minutes, asked two weeks after it arose.
Nobody could have shortened this.
Of seventy-one days, six were entirely mine, forty-six were entirely theirs, and fifteen were shared — which is to say, available. The shared days are the only ones worth working on. One supplier's own invoice, not a benchmark.
Take one invoice that took seventy-one days and split the days by who owned them. Some were yours, most were theirs, and a few belonged to both.
The delay in “Whose Clock Each Day Belongs To” needs separate timestamps for work, approval, invoicing and settlement. Teams reviewing visit this product reference for 7 minute rule for payroll can strengthen the work-record part of that chain without pretending to explain what happened inside the customer’s accounts-payable process.
The split is worth doing once, because it tells you where effort can actually change anything.
Additional context for “Whose Clock Each Day Belongs To” is available through BBB business resources. A sound review separates the work record, invoice, approval and final settlement.
The days that were yours
Between the work finishing and the invoice being sent. Between a rejection and the corrected resubmission. Between a query arriving and being answered.
Usually fewer than most suppliers expect, and entirely removable.
The days that were theirs
Matching queues, approval chains, absent approvers, payment runs.
Usually the large majority, and not reachable by any amount of effort on your side.
The days that were shared
An unmatched invoice nobody told you about. A receipt nobody recorded. A query that sat unanswered because it went to the wrong person.
These are the interesting ones: invisible to both sides, and closed by one question.
Why the shared days matter most
Because they are the only ones where asking changes the outcome. The days that are theirs do not shorten when chased, and the days that are yours do not need chasing — they need a habit.
Finding the shared days
Two questions, a week apart: has it matched, and has it been approved.
Every shared delay in the list above is surfaced by one of those two.
Doing the split
For three recent invoices: list the dates you know, ask accounts payable for the ones you do not, and attribute each stretch.
An hour's work, and it is usually the first time anybody has looked.
What people expect to find
That the customer is slow. What they usually find is that the customer is slow in ways nobody could have changed, plus two weeks that anybody could have.
What to do with the result
Fix your own days first, because they are free. Then build the two questions into your routine, because they recover the shared ones.
Then accept the rest, or price it.
Pricing what is left
If a customer reliably owns forty-five days regardless of what you do, that is a fact about the cost of serving them.
It belongs in the price or in the decision about whether to serve them, not in a monthly irritation.
Keeping it going
Five dates per invoice, recorded as they happen: sent, matched, approved, scheduled, paid.
After a year the pattern per customer is unmistakable and entirely factual.
Doing it on one real invoice
The exercise only works on a specific invoice with actual dates, not on an impression of how a customer behaves. Take the slowest payment of the last quarter and write down every date you can establish: agreed, started, delivered, receipted, invoiced, validated, approved, paid.
Several of those will be unknown, and the gaps are themselves a finding — a supplier who cannot say when an invoice was receipted has identified the part of the process it has no visibility of.
What comes out is a line with named stretches rather than a single number of days late. Almost always two or three stretches account for most of the total, and at least one of them turns out to be yours.
Why suppliers resist the arithmetic
The exercise is unpopular because it reliably finds days belonging to the supplier, and they are usually the easiest days to remove.
Work finished on a Tuesday and invoiced at month end. An onboarding form started after delivery. A reference typed from memory and rejected. A submission that missed a cut-off by two days.
None of these are a buyer's fault, all of them are free to fix, and all of them are more comfortable left unexamined — particularly when there is a genuine and much larger delay at the other end to be annoyed about.
The honest version of the split is what makes the rest of this collection usable. A supplier who knows that fifty-five of seventy-one days were inside somebody else's building can price for it, plan around it and stop treating each instance as a surprise. A supplier who also knows that fourteen of its own days were avoidable has found the only part of the number it can change this month.
The column that changes a decision
Done across every invoice of a year rather than one, the split produces a figure per customer: the share of days that were theirs.
Set beside what each customer is worth, it occasionally reverses a judgement. The customer with the best rate turns out to hold invoices for two months; the awkward one with the portal pays in five weeks without fail.
That comparison is not available from any impression of how a relationship feels, and it is the only version of this exercise that affects next year rather than merely explaining last year.
What the exercise changes
Mostly the conversation you have with yourself. A supplier who knows exactly which forty-six days were unreachable stops taking them personally, and spends the effort where it works.