Cash Asleep in the Building · Chapter Five

The Payment Run Held Until Monday

Four ways a day of cash can move, and why only one of them is a gain.

Ammanuel Santa Anna · ORCID 0009-0008-3244-0306

Chapter Five of Cash Asleep in the Building: Working Capital as an Organisational Question.

Abstract

Four ways a day of cash can move, and why only one of them is a gain. It is ten to five on the last Friday of the quarter, and the payments clerk has the supplier run on her screen, approved and ready. Two hundred and twelve invoices, every one of them due, every one of them checked. At four o'clock the group's finance office rang her manager, and her manager has just come over to her desk, a little embarrassed, to say that the run should be held until Monday. Nothing is wrong with it. The group would simply like the quarter's closing cash balance to be higher, and three days will do that. The suppliers will be paid on Monday morning. Most of them will not notice. She holds the run. She knows several of the suppliers will notice, because she is the person they ring, and she knows which ones have payrolls on Monday. Her stomach is tight in the way it gets when she has been asked to do something that is allowed and not right. She logs off at half past five.

Read the PDFRead the whole bookdoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989325

Cite this chapter

Santa Anna, A. (2026). The Payment Run Held Until Monday. In Cash Asleep in the Building. Luminous Prosperity Inc. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23989325

@incollection{santaanna2026cash5,
  author    = {Santa Anna, Ammanuel},
  title     = {The Payment Run Held Until Monday},
  booktitle = {Cash Asleep in the Building},
  chapter   = {5},
  publisher = {Luminous Prosperity Inc.},
  year      = {2026},
  doi       = {10.5281/zenodo.23989325},
  url       = {https://business.hautelumiere.life/library/cash-asleep-in-the-building/05-the-payment-run-held-until-monday/}
}

References

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  3. Chen, H., Frank, M. Z., & Wu, O. Q. (2005). What actually happened to the inventories of American companies between 1981 and 2000? Management Science, 51(7), 1015–1031. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.1050.0368
  4. Aktas, N., Croci, E., & Petmezas, D. (2015). Is working capital management value-enhancing? Evidence from firm performance and investments. Journal of Corporate Finance, 30, 98–113. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcorpfin.2014.12.008

Every chapter of Cash Asleep in the Building

  1. Chapter OneProfitable on Paper, Short on Fridaydoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989321
  2. Chapter TwoWhat the Stockroom Is Afraid Ofdoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989322
  3. Chapter ThreeThe Invoice Nobody Could Paydoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989323
  4. Chapter FourNinety Days Is Somebody's Payrolldoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989324
  5. Chapter FiveThe Payment Run Held Until Mondaydoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989325
  6. Chapter SixThe First Ninety Daysdoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989326
  7. Chapter SevenThe Field Manualdoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989327

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The licence

Free to read, share, quote, translate and teach, non-commercially, for ever, under the Luminous Library Licence 1.0. Every other right is the Author’s. Deposited on Zenodo in the Luminous Prosperity community.