A Due Date Is Not a Payment

RC/CF/2026/T.30 · 20 March 2026 · Supports

To the Cashflow Council,

I am writing in reply to Amina in Karachi. I will not assume that our experiences are the same. But her letter brought me back to a date I had written on a calendar and then had to keep looking at: 5 November.

On 6 October 2025, I sent an invoice for PKR 240,000 to a large buyer after completing agreed work. Our written terms gave the buyer 30 days to pay, making 5 November the due date. The invoice was acknowledged the next day. No one disputed the amount or asked for a correction.

When the due date passed, I followed up by email. I followed up again by phone. I was told the payment was being processed, but no payment date was confirmed. On 21 November, I asked once more. I received no specific explanation of a problem with the invoice. The money arrived on 22 December: 47 days after the due date.

For a large buyer, those weeks may be one line in an accounts-payable process. For a small business, they are not an accounting abstraction. I had already committed money to the work and had bills of my own to meet. I used savings to cover the gap and delayed a payment that I had planned to make to someone who had done work for me. I was not insolvent. I was simply being made to finance a larger organisation’s timetable without agreeing to do so.

I considered sending a formal legal notice. I asked what that would involve and was quoted a legal fee that made the next step difficult to justify against one overdue invoice. A civil claim would have required more time and expense, while I still hoped to receive other work from the same buyer.

I did not want to turn a payment reminder into a public fight. So I kept asking, kept the correspondence, and waited.

In Pakistan, a written contract matters. The Contract Act, 1872 provides the general framework for contractual obligations. Section 34 of the Code of Civil Procedure gives a court discretion to award interest in a money decree; it does not, by itself, make late interest automatic on every invoice. In my case, the agreed 30-day term gave me a date to point to, but the date alone did not put money in my account or make the delay costly to the buyer.

That is why I support the 15-Day Pay Standard being considered by this Council. For an undisputed invoice, payment within 15 days would make the normal waiting period shorter and more predictable. Automatic interest when payment is late would mean the supplier does not have to bargain for compensation after the event or decide whether pursuing it is worth the cost. Publishing payment times would let suppliers see a buyer’s practice before they depend on its promises.

The word “undisputed” needs to be applied fairly. A buyer should be able to raise a real issue, but it should do so promptly and identify the invoice or amount in question. Silence should not become a way to keep the clock from starting. If only part of an invoice is disputed, the undisputed portion should still be paid. Those details would protect both sides without turning routine approval into an open-ended delay.

A 15-day standard would not solve every cashflow problem. It would not make every buyer behave well, and it would not erase the cost of waiting through the past months. But it would change the starting expectation. The small supplier would not have to treat “payment is being processed” as a substitute for a date, or choose between chasing money and preserving a relationship.