October can be a spookily deceptive month in accounts receivable.
The year still seems to have a fair bit of runway. December feels comfortably far away. Your customers are hard at it, invoices are moving, and there are plenty of weeks to follow up.
Then suddenly… What? It’s late November?
And by then, your customer’s AP contact is away. Someone else is waiting for an approval. A controller is guarding cash until year-end. Another customer is already playing safe in preparation for the slower weeks of January.
And the invoice you were sure would be cleared before Christmas is still sitting there. Unpaid.
For Canadian businesses, this year’s holiday run-up comes with added pressure.
Trade uncertainty continues to weigh on business outlooks, while tariffs and other cost increases are working their way through supply chains.
Stats Canada recently found that more than a quarter of businesses had passed tariff-related cost increases on to customers, while many others were still absorbing some or all of those increases themselves.
That means there is less spare cash circulating through lots of businesses.
And when cash gets tight, payment priorities get very… interesting.
The Psychology of the Payment List
Most companies really DO want to pay their bills.
But when available cash shrinks, somebody has to decide which bills get paid first. It’s a smart and logical triage.
Payroll has a hard, immovable deadline.
Taxes too, and late remittances lead to painful consequences.
Critical suppliers are needed to keep production moving.
The landlord expects payment.
A lender demands it (or else).
And then there are all the other invoices, just one of which is yours.
This is where accounts receivable becomes largely a question of psychology.
Companies tend to prioritize obligations that are urgent, important to ongoing operations, or likely to create real consequences if ignored. An invoice that generates another polite automated reminder is labeled to slide down that list.
As the holidays approach, the temptation to preserve cash tends to get even greater. Year-end commitments are coming due, bonuses are payable, inventory decisions have to be made, and January can bring its own seasonal slowdown.
Your customers are planning around all this too.
Ghosted Before Christmas?
Every seasoned AR professional has scar tissue from the experience.
When the person who usually answers suddenly doesn’t.
Your email triggers an out-of-office autoreply.
The AP contact says the invoice is in the queue for someone else’s approval.
(Sadly, that person has already left for vacation.)
Or you hear: “We’ll get this sorted out in the New Year.”
Some of this might be perfectly legitimate holiday disruption.
Most of it is that strategic delay I was talking about.
And sometimes the distinction becomes obvious only after valuable weeks have been exhausted.
This is why October and November are such important collection months. You still have time to reach the right people, resolve disputes, confirm payment dates, and escalate accounts while offices are operating normally.
Waiting until December 18 to get serious about an overdue invoice never improves your leverage. It makes you the Grinch.
Start With the Accounts You Don’t Want to Carry Into January
So, take a close look at your aging report now.
Which accounts would make you most uncomfortable if they were still unpaid on January 2?
Start there.
Pay particular attention to larger balances, old promises, unresolved disputes, changing payment patterns, and accounts where communication has been getting increasingly difficult.
Then decide what needs to happen before the holidays.
That could mean obtaining a firm payment date.
It might lead to resolving an invoice dispute that has been sitting untouched.
It could require getting another decision-maker involved.
And in some cases, it means deciding that the account has been worked internally long enough.
Give Yourself a Holiday Deadline
One of the easiest ways for overdue accounts to linger is to have no defined point at which internal collection efforts end.
Set that point now.
For example, decide that any account meeting certain age, balance, or communication criteria will receive management review by a specific November date.
That creates enough time to act before December schedules become unpredictable.
It also prevents the painfully familiar January conversation:
“Why didn’t you deal with this BEFORE the holidays?”
Set the deadline and create a calendar alert or write it down where you won’t lose sight of it.
Don’t Confuse Patience With Relationship Management
Businesses are often reluctant to escalate a good customer because they value the relationship. Makes sense, right?
That instinct can be completely appropriate.
But allowing an account to drift for another six or eight weeks doesn’t necessarily protect the relationship. In many cases, clear communication is more effective.
A good customer experiencing temporary cash pressure will appreciate a practical conversation.
A customer deliberately stretching you will probably change their tone when they realize the account is being taken seriously, whether by you or by a top collection agency.
One thing is sure: a business heading toward deeper financial doo-doo is not going to become easier to collect from because you waited until after New Year’s.
January Has a Habit of Arriving Faster Than We Think
Part of the holiday magic is how it compresses business time.
A few lost days around Christmas and New Year’s can turn into several lost weeks once vacations, reduced staffing, delayed approvals, and January catch-up are added together.
That makes early autumn an unusually valuable window for cleaning up receivables.
Review your aging. Talk to customers. Resolve disputes. Get commitments in writing. Decide which accounts deserve escalation.
And make all those decisions while there is still plenty of year left to act on them.
Because the real nightmare before the holidays is worse than a ghost.
It’s discovering in January that the overdue account you meant to deal with in October is suddenly MUCH harder to collect.
If collecting aging accounts is getting scary, or if you have questions about how MetCredit can improve your cash flow, reach out any time. There’s never any obligation, and our business debt collection experts are always to help.
President and CEO of MetCredit, Canada's top-performing consumer and commercial collection agency
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