Supplier terms and the credit you are quietly extending

Everything in the previous module is happening to you from the other direction. Your suppliers are managing their receivables and you are one of them. The terms you have with them are the cheapest source of working capital most small businesses will ever have, and they are usually inherited rather than negotiated.

Ask for them anyway. A supplier who has been paid reliably for a year will often agree to thirty days where you have been paying on delivery, and that single change can fund a whole cycle. What makes the ask work is the record behind it: reliability is the thing you are trading, so it only exists if you have been reliable. What makes it fail is asking under pressure — a request for longer terms in the week you cannot pay reads as distress, and it is remembered.

The discipline is to hold both sides in view at once. If you give customers forty-five days and take thirty from suppliers, you are funding a fifteen-day gap out of your own account on every single order, permanently, and it grows with your sales. That may be the normal shape of your industry, and it may be unavoidable. But it should appear as a line you have looked at, not as a mystery about where the money goes.