Letter from the table: Why I oppose a 15‑day rule

Letter from the table

Members of the Cashflow Council,

I am writing against CF-001 as drafted. I know what a late payment costs. I am not asking the Council to accept late payment as normal. I oppose making 15 days the standard for every undisputed invoice from a small supplier to a large buyer. A rule can be well-intentioned and still make a buyer more cautious about working with us in the first place.

In January, I completed a piece of project work for a large national retail chain. I will not name the buyer. The work was accepted, and there was no disagreement about what had been delivered. My contract set a 45-day term. On 4 February, I sent an invoice for CAD 18,600 plus CAD 930 in GST, for a total of CAD 19,530.

I submitted it through the buyer’s accounts-payable portal with the required acceptance documents. I checked the portal several times. It showed the invoice as received, but no payment date. I contacted the accounts-payable desk and followed up through my contact on the project. I asked whether anything was missing and whether a partial payment was possible. I did not receive a notice that the invoice was disputed. I kept checking and following up because there was no other useful step available to me.

The contractual due date was 21 March. The money arrived on 16 April: 26 days late. That was not just an irritating delay. I had scheduled expenses on the assumption that a completed, accepted job would be paid according to the written terms. Instead, I drew CAD 3,800 on my line of credit to cover near-term costs. At 11.2% annual interest, keeping that amount outstanding for about 36 days cost roughly CAD 42. I also paid a CAD 35 charge after I had to move one of my own payments. Those are the direct costs I can count. I spent hours checking the portal, gathering the same records again, and asking for a date rather than doing paid work.

I file GST quarterly. My January–March reporting period ended on 31 March, with the return and payment due on 30 April. I had to plan around that obligation while the invoice was still unpaid. The GST on the invoice was never money I could treat as mine to spend, but the delay still left me bridging ordinary costs with borrowed money.

For me, the lesson is not that a 45-day term is good or that 26 extra days are acceptable. It is that the key protections should be a clear agreed due date, a prompt and specific notice if any part of an invoice is disputed, and consequences when an undisputed amount is late. The proposed standard would improve my position on that February invoice: it would have called for payment much sooner, with automatic interest and public reporting of payment times. I understand why the Council wants that result.

But I am concerned about what a 15-day rule could do before an invoice is even issued. A large buyer can respond to a short deadline by making its onboarding and acceptance process more demanding, buying from fewer suppliers, or insisting on more conditions before work begins. A smaller supplier may then face a choice between accepting an onerous process and losing the opportunity. And if the clock starts only after a buyer’s internal approval, the promised 15 days may not protect the supplier at all. The standard must not reward a buyer for stretching the definition of “undisputed” or delaying acceptance.

In my case, nothing about the work needed a 45-day wait. But a uniform 15-day deadline does not distinguish between an ordinary, complete invoice and a genuine documentation problem, nor does it guarantee that a large buyer will keep offering work to small suppliers on workable terms. I would rather see a standard that is strong enough to change the buyer’s behaviour and precise enough not to push the risk back onto the supplier in a different form.

I would support a 30-day default for undisputed invoices, automatic interest when the agreed deadline is missed, and publication of payment times. If a buyer disputes part of an invoice, it should identify the disputed amount and reason promptly and pay the undisputed portion on time. The Council should also make clear that the payment clock cannot be paused by an internal approval step after the buyer has received a complete invoice and accepted the work. Those protections would have addressed what happened to me without

setting a deadline that could lead buyers to avoid small suppliers or impose harder terms on them.