As we are small, we have a close relationship with our customers so our payment terms are pretty flexible. This is often our un-doing as we allow payments to be delayed which is great for our customers as they may be in a difficult situation, but then the repercussions on us is massive. We then have to juggle funds to pay our suppliers who aren’t so lenient. We don’t buy in a great deal of products, our outgoings are primarily software and services, neither of which we can reclaim the VAT, but what we offer is VAT-able, so as we have previously mentioned, it’s not as easy as putting the VAT into a separate account and leaving it there for the quarterly return, bills need to be paid and staff need to be paid. Life would be so easy if payment terms were adhered to, but our long term clients mean a lot to us, so we don’t want to upset them by chasing up invoices. We’re not the sort of people to hound anyone for money, we provide the service and the service needs to be paid for ultimately.
