Measuring how long money waits after work is finished.
INTRO - explained simply:
When work is finished, people say “yes, it is done”.
But money often does not move at the same time.
Nothing is wrong.
Everyone already agreed.
The money is just waiting.
We are building a way to see that waiting.
Who we are
We are a small independent group interested in how commitments quietly move through the world.
Behind every system, automated or human, there is an agreement, and behind every agreement there is a chain of actions that must take place before something real happens.
We believe the economy is slowly shifting toward processes that carry these commitments forward almost on their own.
This project is an attempt to observe that shift.
Why this is needed:
There are rules that say people should pay quickly, but when companies are very big, the money often gets lost inside their systems and takes much longer to come out.
\We want to understand how long these delays are and how often they happen.
How we do it:
We measure how many days pass between work being accepted and money being paid.
This number is called Settlement Latency.
Settlement Latency = Payment Date − Acceptance Date
Why It Matters:
After work is accepted, payment is no longer a commercial problem. It is an execution problem. Most delays are not caused by refusal to pay.
They are caused by invisible process gaps:
an approval step that no one owns, a system that exports data only once a week, a manual check that blocks everything behind it.
These delays are not measured, so they accumulate quietly.
What looks like “late payment” is often just lost time inside the organisation.
Until that time is visible, nothing changes.
Who notices this first:
A small supplier who keeps checking their bank account.
A finance team that cannot explain why some payments take days and others take months.
A public authority that reports“on-time payments” but still creates cash stress in its supply chain.
These people do not need promises.
They need visibility.
The bigger picture:
Think of this index as a clock for money.
It shows where time is lost.
When you can see lost time, you can fix it.
How you can help:
If you are part of a business or organisation that experiences delayed payments especially cases where payment is delayed dramatically, then you can help us build this metric. Tell us your story, share your needs and data
(we only need anonymised information showing: acceptance date, payment date, invoice value band, ideally - company size).
No company names.
No personal data.
Get in Touch:
If you are willing to contribute anonymised data for a pilot, please leave your details below. We will reply with the required format