What should I pay this week?
Rank your payables by what it actually costs you not to pay them, against the cash you have.
One line per bill: vendor, amount, due date. Optionally add priority (stops work / important / flexible), then a discount % and days left to take it. Tabs or commas both work, and a header row is fine.
What is genuinely available after payroll and anything already committed — not the bank balance.
This ranks pressure and shows the cost of waiting. It is not advice about which supplier to stretch, and it is not a solvency opinion.
Paying by age is the most expensive habit in a small business
Every business that has ever been short of cash has run the same Monday morning: a bank balance, a stack of bills that adds up to more than the balance, and a decision that has to be made before lunch. The decision almost always gets made the same way too, by paying whoever has been waiting longest, because age is the one number the aging report puts in front of you.
It is the wrong number. Age measures patience already spent; it says nothing about what happens next. The supplier ninety days out may have quietly decided you are good for it. The one due Friday may have a credit policy that files your account for hold at day one. Sorting by age treats those two identically, and the cost of that mistake is not a late fee — it is a week of production you cannot make up.
The second thing the aging report hides is that some of those invoices are carrying an interest rate. An early-payment discount is a financing decision in disguise: 2% for paying twenty days sooner is roughly a 37% annual return on the cash, which is more than any facility a small business is likely to be offered. Letting one lapse to protect the bank balance is borrowing at a rate nobody would sign for on purpose. Most owners have never seen it expressed that way, which is exactly why the discounts get dropped first when things get tight.
What is left after both of those is the thing no spreadsheet can settle. Once the cash has been committed to whoever genuinely stops the business and to whatever is measurably expensive to delay, the remaining bills are a set of relationships with different amounts of slack in them, and you are the only one who knows which. This tool ranks the pressure, draws the line where the money runs out, and tells you the size of the gap. It does not tell you whose call to take on Wednesday.
What this tool does not do
The ranking is only as honest as the priority you assign each vendor. Mark everything 'stops work' and it degrades into a sort by size. The discount rate assumes you would otherwise have paid on the due date; if you routinely pay late, the real days of cash you give up are longer and the rate is lower than shown. It works one pay run at a time and has no view of what is due next week, what your customers owe you, or what is already committed - so the cash figure you enter carries the whole model.
- Decide which supplier to stretch - it shows the cost of waiting and stops there
- Anything about your receivables, your credit line, or money arriving between now and the next run
- Payroll, taxes and trust-fund obligations, which are not trade payables and do not belong in this list
- Late fees, interest on overdue balances, or contractual penalties in your supply agreements
- Whether a vendor will actually stop - that is your read of the relationship, and the tool takes your word for it
- Solvency, preference risk in an insolvency, or any question about paying creditors unequally when the business may not survive
Frequently asked questions
Should I just pay the oldest invoices first?
That is the default almost everyone falls into, and it is the reason the wrong supplier gets paid. Age tells you how long someone has been waiting; it tells you nothing about what happens if they keep waiting. The vendor whose invoice is ninety days old may be willing to wait another thirty. The one whose invoice is due Friday may stop shipping on Monday. Rank by consequence, then let age break the ties.
How much is an early-payment discount actually worth?
Far more than it looks. Take 2/10 net 30: a 2% discount for paying on day 10 instead of day 30. You are giving up 20 days of cash to earn 2%, which annualises to 2/98 x 365/20, or about 37% a year. Almost no credit line costs that. If you are choosing between drawing on a facility and skipping a discount, the discount is usually the more expensive of the two to give up.
What counts as a supplier who stops work?
Anyone whose reaction to non-payment is operational rather than financial. A carrier who holds your freight, a landlord, a sole-source component supplier, a subcontractor mid-job, a software vendor who disables the account your team works in. The test is not how angry they will be. It is whether the business can still run on Tuesday.
What if the ranking says I cannot cover the suppliers who stop work?
Then the ranking has done its job, and re-sorting it will not help. That gap is the number to take into a conversation with a bank, with a customer who owes you, or with the supplier themselves about terms. A payment schedule cannot create cash, and a tool that implied otherwise would be lying to you.
Does this tell me which vendors to stretch?
No, and that is deliberate. It shows you the order, where the cash runs out, and what leaving each unpaid bill costs in money and in risk. Which relationship can absorb another two weeks is something you know and a web page does not. The output is built to be taken into that decision, not to replace it.