Picture a week in mid-November, as the pre-festive season pressure is really starting to build. The last supplier who wanted paying before shipping sends a prepayment demand, the AP inbox goes from forty invoices a week to two hundred, and a dozen seasonal staff start on Monday. That means you’ll need to top up with consumables, uniform and general supplies, because there’s no way to pay for them except the operations manager’s card.
UK ecommerce brands typically carry two to three times their normal stock value through November and December, order volumes can triple, and suppliers often want a deposit or full payment before they ship. Whatever the exact multiple in your business, there’s heightened pressure on cash reserves. You have significantly more going out the door before stock sells, invoices being paid late or twice, and more ad hoc spend going on shared cards.
The two additional strains on finance
Peak puts two different strains on the finance team:
- The first strain is working capital. Inventory bought and often prepaid in September and October is not cash again until it sells in November and December, so the gap has to be funded from reserves, from a facility, or from supplier terms.
- The second strain is control. A surge of supplier invoices has to be checked, approved and paid without duplicates or misses, while a temporary workforce needs to buy small things quickly and visibly. Luckily this additional operational strain can be prepared for in the six weeks before peak.
Funding and overtime don't fix a lack of control
To cover the working-capital gap finance looks for funding, and handles the control problem with overtime for the AP team and a reminder to spenders to be careful with the card.
However, funding only changes the cash position, and the invoice surge is just as hard to process with a facility in place as without one. Overtime doesn’t change that either, because the invoices are still handled in the order they arrive rather than the order they were planned.
Additionally, shared cards for seasonal staff create a problem that shows up later. The December statement ends up listing several hundred small purchases under the ops manager’s name. This list could have been purchased by twelve different people, and by the time anyone reconciles it in January the temps have left.
How predictable is the invoice surge?
While the seasonal invoice surge can be a shock to the system, it’s actually easily predictable and manageable with the right systems in place. Every purchase order raised in September carries a delivery date and payment terms, so finance can work out when each supplier invoice will arrive and fall due, and build the November and December payment runs from that before a single invoice lands.
The key is to process the surge as it was planned rather than as it lands, which is possible because the information needed to schedule it already exists in the PO book.
Schedule the runs and scope the cards before peak
To smooth the seasonal peak, separate the two strains and prepare the one you can, i.e. control:
- Build the November and December payment runs from the PO calendar in advance, so finance knows which week is heaviest before it arrives.
- Apply policy checks before a run. Approval, duplicate detection and PO matching can be done on the way into the queue, so the run itself is more of a review.
- If needed, give seasonal staff their own cards from day one, capped for packaging and consumables, coded to the seasonal cost centre, and set to end with their contract.
If you do this in October, you can turn the busiest fortnight of the year into much less of a hassle for your finance team.
Where Moss can help
Moss AP brings the surge of supplier invoices into a single queue, where approval rules, purchase-order matching and duplicate checks run before anything is paid, and prepares the payment runs in bulk. The November run can be built and authorised before the invoices arrive.
Moss Cards give seasonal staff their own limited, date-bound cards that terminate automatically at the end of the contract, so their spend is visible as it happens and there is nothing to recover when they leave. None of this changes the working-capital half. Moss’s credit wallet is a repay-in-full facility rather than inventory financing or extended trade credit, so the prepayment gap remains a question for your treasury and your bank.
Imagine mid-October with runs already on the calendar
With the right setup, your finance team can have the November and December payment runs scheduled from the PO calendar by mid-October, and know which week will be heaviest. Each seasonal starter has a card capped for packaging and consumables, coded to the peak cost centre and set to end on 3 January.
When peak hits, the AP inbox is busy but the runs are already on the calendar, and in January there is nothing to chase from anyone who has left.
