Early Payment Programme

[Drawweight]

I received a letter from one of my customers today who have launched an 'early payment scheme' through a company called C2FO.

In short this allows you to access early payment of invoices in return for offering a discount. This discount will vary on a daily basis and you need to bid to see if you are successful or not.

I have to say this is a new one to me. Is this going to be introduced by more companies?

I'm not so desperate to be paid that i'd offer them a penny discount but it would be nice if they could pay invoices normally on time as a matter of course.

[anonymous-user]

Here is a take on vodafone’s Scheme

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-18...

If you don’t need early payment, you will probably not gain much from the scheme

But you should keep the pressure on for payment to agreed terms

[foliedouce]

We've been done by this too. Client went to 90 day terms but then offered we could get paid quicker if we discounted the invoice.

ie we're paying them to factor the money for us.

Doesn't seem right but 90 day terms is not ideal in our business and given the 7 figures a year we do with them we've gone for it.

Seems like a good way for the client to avoid bad PR for poor payments to SMEs

[anonymous-user]

I don’t have much issue with it in the private sector, but I do find it quite repulsive to see it in the public sector

One of the first schemes I saw was the financing of payments to pharmacies - essentially stealing a bit of taxpayers money in my view

And it is spreading!

https://www.greensill.com/news/uk-governments-crow...

[williaa68]

I do some work for a large mining company whose terms are 90 days after the end of the month in which you submit the invoice. They pay on the nail but their terms regularly mean it is over 100 days from invoice to payment. They offer a similar scheme with a sliding scale according to how quickly you want to be paid but none of it makes financial sense to me. I suspect between them the scheme operators and the company must make millions.