Summary record of the second session of the Cashflow Council

Chair and signatory: Harpreet Singh, Chair, Cashflow Council (Manchester, United Kingdom)

Subject: Summary record of the second session of the Cashflow Council

Session information

Sittings: Asia-Pacific sitting, 06:00 UTC; Europe/Africa/Americas sitting, 16:00 UTC. Both sittings formed part of the second session on 15 March 2026.

Attendance: As of 15 March, the Council comprised 52 members from 22 countries. This membership figure is distinct from the number of people who attended either sitting.

Agenda: (a) progress under the call for evidence on CF-001; (b) current report totals and geographic coverage; (c) the information needed to describe payment situations consistently; (d) member contributions on late payment and supplier terms; (e) next steps for evidence collection.

Summary record

1.The Chair opened the session and recalled that the Cashflow Council’s first agenda item, CF-001, was established by the call for evidence issued on 10 February 2026, RC/CF/2026/1. He stated that the session was an evidence-gathering discussion. The Council had not completed the five-part pattern test and had not prepared a draft fix. Members were asked to distinguish their reported experience from conclusions that could only be reached after the evidence had been reviewed.

2.The Chair noted the information available to the Council as of 15 March. The Council had 52 members in 22 countries and had received 109 reports from 34 countries. The median amount at stake in the Cashflow reports was approximately US$4,183. One hundred reports had been filed during the preceding 30 days. These figures described the evidence file at that date; they did not establish the prevalence of late payment across all small businesses or across any particular market.

3.The Chair recalled that the overall Reseated register stood at 218 members in 43 countries, with 444 reports from 47 countries across the councils. He noted that those Assembly-wide figures were distinct from the Cashflow Council’s own membership and report totals. Members were asked not to combine the two sets of figures when describing the CF-001 evidence base.

4.Ms Amina Yusuf of Lagos, Nigeria, described the importance of separating the date on which work was completed, the date an invoice was submitted and the date payment cleared. She said that, in her experience, a record that gave only the stated payment term could omit a long delay before an invoice was accepted for processing. She recommended that the evidence form invite a member to identify each date where known, while permitting an approximate date or an explicit “not known” response.

5.Mr Daniel Wong of Cebu City, Philippines, discussed situations in which a supplier’s payment depended on a buyer’s internal approval or confirmation of delivery. He considered it important to distinguish a genuine disagreement about the goods or service from a delay in administrative approval. He also cautioned that a member might not know which internal step was holding up payment. The Chair recorded that the reporting form should seek the member’s understanding of the reason for delay, without requiring the member to state as fact a reason that had not been confirmed.

6.Ms Isabel Martín of Madrid, Spain, spoke about invoices that were initially disputed in part. She considered it useful to record whether the undisputed portion was paid while the disputed portion was being reviewed. In her view, a report should not be reduced to a single “paid” or “unpaid” outcome where those circumstances differed. The Chair noted the point for consideration in the evidence-form review and stressed that the session made no determination about what payment obligation should apply in such circumstances.

7.Mr Liam O’Connell of Dublin, Ireland, addressed supplier terms that required a small supplier to accept a longer period before payment. He observed that a stated term and the time actually taken to pay were separate pieces of evidence. He proposed recording the term communicated to the supplier, whether it was agreed in writing, and any later change to it. The Chair noted that the Council’s current evidence included both client-pays-late reports and supplier-terms reports, and that the two categories should remain distinguishable.

8.Ms Priya Nair of Bengaluru, India, described the importance of recording the currency and the amount at stake, as well as whether the amount was the full invoice value or only the amount still unpaid. She said that currency conversion could obscure the scale of an individual report if figures were compared without context. The Chair noted that the Council’s reported median amount at stake, approximately US$4,183, was already expressed as an approximate summary and should not be treated as a measure of the total cost of late payment to members.

9.Mr Michael Johnson of Toronto, Canada, raised the difference between a one-off delay and repeated delays involving the same payer or payment arrangement. He considered that recurrence could be relevant to later analysis, but said members should not be asked to identify a company in a public report. The Chair recalled the Assembly’s practice that members remain anonymous unless they choose a public seat and

that reported experiences should describe practices rather than name companies in accusations.

10.Ms Grace Miller of Manchester, United Kingdom, asked how the Council would handle reports in which a member had stopped pursuing an invoice or had accepted a reduced amount to resolve a dispute. She noted that a record limited to the final amount paid could conceal the original amount claimed and the time spent seeking payment. The Chair agreed that any clarification request should be proportionate and should not imply that a member had to provide documents or disclose commercially sensitive information in order for a report to be considered.

11.Mr David Chen of San Francisco, United States, proposed keeping the report’s payment situation separate from the size of the reporting business. He noted that smaller and larger teams might experience the same payment practice differently, while the report itself should still capture the event in a comparable way. The Chair noted that the recorded team-size distribution was: “Just me,” 39%; 2–9, 39%; 10–49, 17%; and 50–249, 6%.

12.Ms Sophie Tremblay of Montréal, Canada, asked that the evidence form make clear that members could report an experience even if they did not know the legal classification of the payment term. She said that requiring members to determine whether a term was lawful could discourage reporting and could confuse evidence of what happened with a later legal assessment. The Chair agreed that the report should capture the member’s account in ordinary language and leave legal characterization for an appropriate later stage.

13.The Council reviewed the distribution of Cashflow reports by country. The leading country counts recorded at the date were the United States, 14; Canada, 13; the United Kingdom, 11; Spain, 9; India, 8; the Philippines, 6; Nigeria, 4; and Ireland, 3. The Chair noted that the listed country counts were not the full set of reports, and that the reports came from 34 countries in total. Members

were asked not to describe the leading countries as a ranking of national payment performance.

14.The Council reviewed the two recorded situation categories: client-pays-late, 90 reports; and supplier-terms, 19 reports. The Chair stated that these were categories used in the current evidence register, not conclusions about the causes of the reported experiences. Members observed that some accounts might contain elements of both situations. It was agreed that any proposed recategorization should preserve the original report and make the reason for a change traceable.

15.In considering the evidence file, the Chair reiterated that Volume, Frequency, Consistency, Spread and Corroboration were the five elements of the pattern test. The figures available on 15 March described volume and spread within the submitted reports, but the Council had not completed the test. Members had not established a finding on frequency or consistency, and corroboration remained a matter for further evidence review. No speaker proposed that the Council treat the current count as a finding that a particular practice had passed the pattern test.

16.Members discussed the limits of the evidence. The reports were submitted by members and were not a population survey. A high report count from a country could reflect the number of reports received, the membership’s reach, or other factors; the record did not permit the Council to distinguish those explanations. Members agreed that public descriptions should state the reporting period and the denominator being used whenever a report count was cited.

17.The Chair summarized the discussion as supporting clearer evidence capture, not a substantive payment rule. The Council did not decide a maximum payment period, an interest rate, an enforcement mechanism or a publication requirement. It did not adopt a standard, issue a recommendation to buyers or authorize a letter to a chief executive. Those

steps would require completion of the evidence process and the relevant Assembly procedures.

Conclusions and decisions

18.The Council agreed to continue work under CF-001 as an open call for evidence. Reports would continue to be collected and reviewed without assuming that any practice had passed the five-part pattern test.

19.The Council agreed that report clarification should, where relevant, distinguish the work or delivery date, invoice submission date, payment date, stated payment term and any known reason for delay. The form should allow members to indicate that a date or reason was unknown. This was an evidence-capture direction for review, not an adopted revision to the form.

20.The Council agreed that “client-pays-late” and “supplier-terms” should remain separately identifiable in the current register. If a report appears to fit both categories, the Secretariat should preserve its original entry and record any subsequent classification decision and its basis.

21.The Council agreed that public summaries of CF-001 should make clear that the reports were member submissions, not a representative survey. Country counts should not be presented as country-level performance rankings. The report totals, categories and other figures should be attributed to the date on which they were recorded.

22.No ballot was held at the session. No draft fix was approved. The Council made no finding that CF-001 had passed any element, or all elements, of the pattern test. The Chair confirmed that any future proposal for a draft fix would follow the evidence review and public consultation stages set out in the Reseated process.

Action items

Next session

23.The Council agreed to reconvene at its next scheduled Open Table session. The Secretariat was asked to circulate the date and sitting details.

Certification