Third month running they've paid late. At what point do I move the volume?

Not the usual version of this thread — they do pay. That's what makes it hard.

Terms are net-30. Actual: 34 days in August, 41 in September, 38 in October. Every one of them landed in full, every one after a chaser from me, and every time the AM is apologetic and blames "the finance cycle". Volume with them is mid five figures a month so this is a real amount of float.

Caveat on my own position: my media spend is prepaid, so a 40-day cycle instead of a 30-day one is roughly a third of a month's budget I'm carrying on their behalf. If I were running organic I probably wouldn't have posted this.

So what's the actual threshold? Drift with payment isn't the same as non-payment and I don't want to burn a good rate over ten days.

late but paying is a pricing question not a trust question. work out what the extra ten days of float costs you and ask them for that much on the rate. if they say no you know where you stand

Depends what you're running, but with prepaid spend I'd stop trying to fix the date and change the frequency instead.

Weekly at a lower cap does two things at once. Your exposure drops from a month and a bit to about eight days, and you stop caring whether they're four days late because four days on a weekly invoice is noise. Most networks will do it above a certain volume and yours is above it.

The rate hit is usually nothing, occasionally a point or two. Against a third of a month of float, a point is cheap.

Before any of this — go and read the terms again and tell us whether it says net-30, or net-30 from invoice approval.

Those are completely different contracts and the second one is the common one. If it's approval-based they aren't late at all, they're taking eight days to approve and then paying on time, and every chaser you've sent has been about the wrong step.

Checked. "Within 30 days of invoice approval." So you're right on the contract and I've been chasing the wrong thing for three months.

I'll take the correction but not the conclusion. Approval took two days in August and nine in October, on invoices that got no query and no adjustment. Nothing is being approved in those nine days. It's the same delay, wearing a compliant hat.

The approval clause is in every contract i sign here also. Nobody ever explain to me what is being approved, my friend.

The drift is the signal, and it's the one people always argue away because the money keeps arriving.

Every network I've watched go under did this first. Not a missed payment — a payment that arrives a bit later each cycle while everyone is very nice about it. 34, 41, 38 is not random noise around 30, it's a number that has stopped being anchored to anything. What's happening upstream is they're paying whoever shouted most that week out of whatever landed from the advertisers, and you're finding out where you rank in that queue.

I don't think it means they're going under. Most of the ones that do this just carry on doing it for years. But I'd want a second network live and taking 20% of the volume before I needed one, because setting that up while you're owed forty grand is a bad month.

We had this same conversation about a different network in about 2019 and the people who set up the backup looked paranoid for eighteen months and then didn't.