Aged creditors: knowing what you owe and when

An aged creditors report is the mirror of the debtors one: everything you owe, grouped by how long it has been outstanding. It gets far less attention, because money you have not paid feels less urgent than money you have not received — and that asymmetry is exactly why suppliers quietly move you down their priority list before anybody internally notices.

How to read an aged creditors report

• The current column is your working capital position; the older columns are your reputation.
• Anything beyond sixty days with a supplier you intend to keep is a relationship problem rather than a cash one.
• Concentration matters: owing most of the total to one supplier is a dependency, particularly if they are hard to replace.
• Credit balances usually mean a payment on account nobody allocated, or a credit note the supplier has not applied.
• Invoices in dispute should be visible as disputes rather than silently ageing, since an unexplained old balance reads as non-payment.

Why paying everything immediately is not prudence

Paying on agreed terms is not late payment, and clearing every invoice on receipt donates your working capital to somebody else's balance sheet. The discipline is to pay on time rather than early, and to know which suppliers warrant an exception — a small specialist who genuinely needs the cash, somebody offering a settlement discount worth more than the money costs you, or a supplier whose goodwill you will need during a shortage. Those are deliberate decisions; paying everybody the day their invoice arrives is the absence of one.

Watch for invoices that are old because nobody approved them rather than because you chose not to pay. That is the commonest cause of a supplier chasing a balance your accounts consider unresolved, and it is an internal process failure wearing the costume of a payment decision.

Running it alongside the payment cycle

1. Review the report on the day before each payment run rather than at month end.
2. Resolve approvals and disputes before the run, since an invoice held for either reason will otherwise age another cycle.
3. Match the ageing to your agreed terms per supplier instead of a uniform thirty days, or the report misstates who is actually overdue.
4. Check for duplicates before paying, because the same invoice arriving by email and by post is a recurring cause of double payment.
5. Keep a note of anything deliberately held and why, so the supplier gets a consistent answer when they call.

Ettex Expenses holds the bills with their due dates derived from each supplier's agreed terms, so the ageing reflects what was actually agreed rather than an assumption. The payment run itself is where the report becomes decisions, which is why the two belong on the same day.