The day your biggest customer becomes your bank.

The gap is not an exception. It is the market.

The European Commission's Payment Observatory, reporting 2024 data, puts average agreed business-to-business terms in the EU at 43 days and the average time actually taken to pay at 60.3 days. In only five member states was the average business-to-business payment period under 60 days. Those figures come from the Commission, but the underlying survey is Intrum's — it is the best European series that exists, and it is a commercial survey, not official statistics.

Where a statutory measured series does exist, the numbers are not softer. Large companies in the United Kingdom must report their payment performance by law. In 2025, across 11,178 reports, they paid suppliers in a median of 32 days, 15% of invoices were paid late, and the slowest sector was manufacturing at 45 days.

The point is not which number is right for your category. The point is that the distance between what was agreed and when the money arrived is structural, measured, and controlled by the payer.

Somebody finances that gap. It is you.

Between paying your supplier and being paid by your customer, the cash is not in your account. It is in the product, on a pallet, in a container, on a shelf. That window has to be funded by something.

If you have no facility, it is funded by the money you raised — the money you sold part of your company to get. You did not raise it to lend it, interest-free, to a business with a stronger balance sheet than yours. But that is the transaction you just signed.

Winning makes it worse, and it makes it worse fastest.

Every additional order widens the window before it closes it. A company doubling its volume with an unchanged payment gap needs more cash this month than last, and the profit that would cover it has not arrived yet.

Which is why the second order is more dangerous than the first. The first you can fund out of the raise. The second lands before the first is paid. Founders describe this moment as a cash flow problem. It is not. It is a growth problem wearing a cash flow costume, and the faster the growth the worse it gets.

Since 2024 you can check whether your customer does this deliberately.

Most founders assume slow payment is inefficiency. Sometimes it is policy — a reverse factoring programme where a bank pays the supplier early at a discount while the customer pays the bank much later, so the customer's own balance sheet shows no debt.

You can now see it. An amendment to IAS 7, adopted into EU law by Commission Regulation (EU) 2024/1317 and applying to reporting periods beginning on or after 1 January 2024, requires a company to disclose its supplier finance arrangements: the carrying amounts, how much of that has already been paid to suppliers by the finance provider, and — this is the useful one — the range of payment due dates.

If a listed customer's published accounts show a due-date range running well beyond what they are offering you, you are not negotiating with a slow department. You are negotiating against a financing strategy. Read it before the meeting.

Negotiate the terms, not the price.

Terms are the one line in a contract where a concession costs the payer almost nothing and costs you your own cost of capital. Which is exactly why they are the line most easily given away — it does not feel like a discount, and nobody in the room calls it one.

Things that are negotiable and are almost never asked for: a deposit on order; payment triggered by despatch rather than by receipt; shorter terms on a first order, presented as a trial rather than a demand; invoicing on production rather than on delivery.

And define the clock from an event you control. "Thirty days from invoice" and "thirty days from goods receipt confirmation" are different contracts. The second one starts whenever their warehouse gets round to it.

When none of this applies.

If you do not pre-fund what you sell, this is an inconvenience rather than a threat. Software, services, anything where the cost of the next unit is close to nothing — the gap costs you patience, not solvency.

And there is one case where accepting bad terms is the right call: when the order buys a reference that opens an entire category, and you have the cash to carry it. Then finance it on purpose, with the number written down. The failure mode is not choosing it. The failure mode is discovering it.

None of this is about the product.

Supply, terms, and whether the business can survive its own growth — that is execution and timing under a real constraint. It is why, when a founder writes to me, working capital comes before vision. Not because vision does not matter, but because the company has to still be there when the vision is due.