Suppliers prioritise cash flow resilience amid worsening trade uncertainty

By the time SAP Taulia’s CFO urged finance leaders to rethink working capital on 1 September, suppliers had already spent months signalling that the cash cycle was worsening. SAP Taulia’s latest supplier survey, published in March and based on responses gathered between 5 and 27 November 2025 from 10,854 respondents at 10,509 supplier companies in 129 countries, found that only 37% of invoices were paid on time in 2025, while 55% were paid late and just 8% early. Global Trade Revi...

ew reported those figures on 10 March (gtreview.com), and SAP Taulia set out the survey methodology in its own release (taulia.com).

That deterioration helps explain why the debate has shifted from pure efficiency to resilience. Writing in SupplyChainBrain on 1 September, Rene Ho said chief finance officers can no longer treat working capital, liquidity and supplier resilience as separate problems, particularly when tariff changes and regulatory shocks reverberate through entire supplier networks. Ho’s argument also drew on a broader change in supplier sentiment: only 46% now cite growth as their primary focus, down from 53% a year earlier, while interest in early-payment solutions has climbed to 66%. SupplyChainBrain carried Ho’s warning (supplychainbrain.com), and SAP Taulia repeated the change in supplier priorities in a later blog post (taulia.com).

The pressure is not evenly distributed, but it is widespread. Global Trade Review said a quarter of suppliers reported squeezed profit margins and 23% faced higher input costs, while nearly a fifth were lifting prices simply to keep trading. Tariff effects varied by market: roughly a quarter of respondents in the US and Canada said higher goods costs linked to tariffs were their biggest problem, compared with 37% in Mexico, where margin pressure was especially acute. In Australia, France, Germany and the UK, about a third pointed instead to uncertainty itself, and 22% globally said they could not yet quantify the tariff effect at all. Those details matter because they show why a uniform payment-terms policy increasingly looks too blunt for a fragmented trading landscape. (gtreview.com)

Treasury specialists are increasingly reading the same data as a warning about liquidity rather than just procurement friction. The Association of Corporate Treasurers’ Treasurer magazine said 18% of suppliers are now waiting between one and 15 days beyond due date, and highlighted the growing use of outside funding tools to plug the gap. Virtual or credit cards were used by 22% of respondents, while early-payment programmes and lines of credit were each used by 16%. Peddy Hashemi, SAP Taulia’s global head of customer success, told the publication: “Across our network, we are seeing that in today’s volatile environment, cash flow is increasingly prioritized over price.” (treasurers.org)

The same theme ran through coverage in procurement and supply-chain media, though sometimes with a sharper edge. In sponsored content published by Supply Chain Dive on SAP Taulia’s behalf, the company argued that buyers are holding cash more tightly in uncertain conditions and effectively pushing the strain downstream. That article said suppliers were not merely waiting for payment any longer: when asked why they sought early payment, 28% said they needed to bridge cash-flow gaps, 21% wanted payment predictability and 20% needed support for day-to-day operations. Procurement360 framed the shift even more starkly, saying suppliers were increasingly choosing speed over full invoice value and turning early payment into a working-capital safeguard rather than an emergency measure. (supplychaindive.com)

There is also a gap between what suppliers want and what buyers currently provide. Supply & Demand Chain Executive reported that only 3% of suppliers receive early payments from buyers, even though 66% say they would accept a discount to get cash sooner. The same outlet noted that one in five businesses do not use external finance at all. Taken together, those figures suggest that many companies still have room to build more flexible liquidity arrangements before stress turns into disruption. (sdcexec.com)

Ho’s prescription is therefore broader than simply paying earlier. In SupplyChainBrain, he argued that finance teams need faster scenario analysis, better visibility into supplier health and closer co-ordination between treasury, procurement and supply-chain functions. The implication is that working-capital choices can no longer be judged solely by cash-conversion metrics inside the buying company. If stretched suppliers start passing on tariff costs, delaying shipments or cutting back inventory, the balance-sheet gain at one end of the chain can become an operational and commercial loss at the other. (supplychainbrain.com)

That is why the March survey has continued to resonate into September. The headline numbers were about late invoices, but the deeper message was about bargaining power and optionality. As SAP Taulia put it in its press release, suppliers are reassessing “every available lever”, and Hashemi said buyers that can offer dependable on-time or early payment will be seen as “true strategic partners”. In other words, cash timing is no longer a back-office technicality. In a volatile trade environment, it is becoming a test of who can keep a supply chain functioning when margins are thin, tariffs are shifting and confidence in prompt payment is ebbing. (taulia.com)

Source: Noah Wire Services