The order from your cannabis customer that turns into a write off usually ships on a day when nothing looks wrong.
The customer is current, the relationship is good, the rep is happy, and the decision that created the exposure was made well before anyone in the back office had a reason to look twice.
Payment behavior rarely changes all at once. It changes in a sequence, and the sequence is fairly consistent across industries.
Four signals worth watching.
1. Sixty days past due, and not for the first time.
The customer used to pay on time. COD became limited terms and the terms worked. Now the invoice is 60 days out, the calls get returned, the commitments get made, and the payment does not arrive.
The check is in the mail is not a data point. The second quarter of slippage is.
2. Communication stops.
Past due is one thing. Past due and quiet is another. When a customer who always picked up stops picking up, the silence is usually about cash, not about the relationship.
3. They stop ordering.
A customer who owes money and has stopped buying has less reason to prioritize that invoice. The cash goes to the suppliers they still need next month. This one is easy to miss, because it shows up as a quiet month in the sales report rather than an alert in the aging.
4. Other suppliers have started seeing slow payment.
Here the account is not past due yet. When a company gets tight, it starts allocating cash and ranking vendors. The primary suppliers often see nothing. The secondary suppliers see it first. If a customer has started stretching someone else, that is worth knowing before the next truck leaves.
Three of these four live inside your own ledger.
Aging, call logs, order history. All internal, and all of it surfaces after the exposure is already on the books.
The fourth comes from outside, arrives earliest, and is the only one no single company can generate alone. It requires other suppliers to be sharing what they are seeing.
Cannabis is still building that layer of infrastructure. Reklaim Credit Solutions is being built around a contributory network of cannabis specific AR aging and payment data, so the fourth signal becomes something the industry shares, rather than something you hear about in a hallway at a trade show.
If contributing your AR data to that network is something you want to understand better, reach out. You get out of a contributory network what you put into it, and this is the kind of credit intelligence the cannabis industry has been missing.