Slow vendor payments cost the vendor first and your AP team second

Every vendor you pay has a payroll date. Your payment run does not know when it is.

The days between an approved invoice and money in the vendor's account are a cost. It never posts to a GL account, so it never makes the AP cost review.

Vendors have already priced the wait. It is printed on the invoice.

A vendor who offers 2/10 net 30 is pricing 20 days of waiting at 2% of the invoice. Run that out over a year and it is 36.5%, uncompounded.

They offer it because 20 days of float costs them more than 2% of the invoice does. That is the vendor's own figure for what payment speed is worth, and it is sitting on an invoice you already have.

Most of the vendors who send you invoices do not offer terms at all. The small trades, a crew and a truck, quote a price and wait. The cost of waiting is still there. It is just not itemized. We have not measured how much of it comes back in the next round of bids. Our guess is that some of it does.

Your AP team pays for the same wait in phone calls

"Where is my payment?" is the vendor call an AP team fields most. Each one runs the same way: find the invoice, find the payment, read the status back, promise to follow up. Each call is a few minutes of somebody's time, and it arrives one call at a time, which is why it never shows up as a line anywhere.

On BillRoute Pay, the most common support question we get is about timing. A payment submitted after the daily cutoff waits for the next run, and the vendor wants to know why the status has not moved. The vendor portal answers the where question without a phone call. It does not shorten the wait.

Most of the calendar is approval, and no payout change touches that

Trace one invoice from arrival to money in the vendor's account. Receipt, entry, approval, payment run, settlement. The stage that consumes the calendar is approval, specifically the interval an invoice sits in a regional's inbox before anyone opens it. That interval is the one to shrink first.

So the order matters. Fix approval routing before you touch anything downstream. A shorter payout after a slow approval is still a slow payment from the vendor's side of the table.

Once approval is fast, what remains is the payment itself. That is the part we have not had a good answer for.

We are working on the wait after approval

We are working on shortening the wait between an approved invoice and money in the vendor's account, inside BillRoute Pay, on the same invoice record the vendor already checks.

There is no date on it and no speed attached, because neither is settled, and a tease with a date on it is a promise. When either is real, we will say so.

Until then, pull your approval aging. If the over-3-day bucket is not empty, that is the wait to fix first. What we are doing about the wait after it is on the what's next page for BillRoute Pay.