Export Finance & Settlement

Buying stock costs money now. Ocean freight is paid before the goods sail. The customer expects 90 days. The tax refund arrives after filing and review. Four flows, four timestamps, one profit figure that quietly assumes all of them happen at once.

The result is familiar: every order is profitable on paper, and the cash position is tight every quarter. A company that makes money on every order and runs out of cash ends the same way as one that loses money on every order.

1. Payment terms treated as a sales concession, not a cost. Ninety days at an unchanged price is an interest-free loan to the customer, and it is rarely reflected in the quote.
2. FX gain and loss discovered afterwards. The quote uses one rate, collection happens weeks later, the difference lands in a generic finance bucket, and nobody traces it back to the order.
3. The tax refund counted as profit. It is cash flow whose timing depends on filing and review. Booked into margin, it produces 'profitable on paper, empty in the account' as a permanent condition.
4. Finance disconnected from the order. Each facility needs specific documents and available limit. By the time the gap is visible, there is no time to assemble either.
5. Receipts that cannot be matched. Money arrives, and which orders and which vehicles it belongs to is unclear. Unmatched receipts hold up everything downstream.

The response is one timeline per order: receivables by ageing bucket, receipts with an explicit ownership link, the refund tracked as its own inflow, and facilities recorded against the documents they require.

It also makes terms priceable. Cash price and 90-day price should not be the same number; the difference is the cost of money, and once it is a number, sales can negotiate with it instead of around it.

Risk assignment is what decides whether insurance is needed, whether factoring makes sense, and whether a risk premium belongs in the quote. Teams that choose a method because 'that is what the customer uses' end up retaining the risk and pricing none of it.

The second-order effect: terms become a negotiating instrument. A customer asking for a discount on cash terms is asking a question the quote can now answer.

The loop matters more than the sequence. When a bank returns a presentation for a discrepancy, tracing back through the document version in force at presentation is the difference between a correction and a re-run — and a re-run extends the terms by weeks.

This is why the finance line and the compliance line must share one document version chain. Two separate version histories reliably produce 'the version presented was not the version declared'.

With all three recorded, three different questions become answerable: was the quoting judgement right, did the committed margin hold, and what was actually earned. With only the settlement rate, the first two can never be answered — and those are the ones that improve pricing.

Two rules follow. Attribute the result to the order, not to a monthly total: a monthly total says 'we lost this much on FX', while an order-level record says which market, with which terms, loses systematically. And do not bury it in a miscellaneous account — anything that is invisible is never priced.

Two practical rules. A salesperson sees only their own accounts' amounts, because cross-territory visibility produces both internal competition and price leakage. And the dashboard shows aggregates by default with customer names behind an authorisation step — dashboards tend to sit on a wall in a public area, and detail on a wall is the most common leak of all.

1. Terms not costed. Ninety days is an interest-free loan. Leaving it out of the quote means subsidising the customer's working capital with your margin.
2. The refund counted as margin. It is cash inflow with an uncertain date. Mixing it into margin keeps 'profitable on paper, empty in the account' alive indefinitely.
3. Recording only the settlement rate. One point in time cannot tell you whether the quoting judgement was right, and cannot be attributed to a market.
4. Receipts without ownership. If one payment cannot be tied to specific orders, matching, margin and ageing all drift.
5. Arranging finance after the gap appears. Facilities need documents and limit in place; arriving late means the documents are assembled in a hurry, which is when they are wrong.
6. Treating the system as a money channel. It does not settle payments and does not lend. Collection runs through banks; financing comes from licensed institutions.

The last one is a boundary, not a limitation. A system that implies it can move money invites a compliance question the product cannot answer, and the question is fair.

Build a ninety-day cash table by hand: receivables by ageing bucket, payables, refunds in progress, facility repayments. If it can be drawn, the conventions already exist and this line systematises them. If it cannot, the structure is what is missing — and no report will invent it.

1. List current receivables as not yet due, due within 30 days, and overdue.
2. Take three orders and compute the capital cost of their terms.
3. Attribute the last three months of FX results to specific orders and see whether it holds.
4. Confirm whether refunds in progress are tracked as their own amount and date.
5. Walk through ageing and the cash timeline in the demo environment.

• Export compliance & documentation
• Vehicle export trading
• Country packs & overseas delivery