Know What You Owe. Always.

The balance is not the position

Cash in the account is not money available. Some of it is VAT you collected and are holding for the Nigeria Revenue Service. Some is payroll due in ten days. Some is a supplier invoice you have received but not entered. The position is the balance minus everything already committed, and most businesses never compute it.

Recording bills when they arrive rather than when they are paid is what makes that arithmetic possible. It is a small habit with a disproportionate effect on how confidently you can spend.

Supplier terms are worth money

• Payment terms: thirty days from a supplier is thirty days of your cash working elsewhere.
• Early-settlement discounts, which are worth taking only when the cash is genuinely spare — a 2% discount is not worth an overdraft.
• Volume pricing, which is worth having tracked so you know when you have crossed a tier.
• Late-payment penalties, which are cheaper to avoid than to argue about.

None of these is negotiable if you cannot say what you spent with a supplier last year. That figure is the whole of your leverage.

Withholding tax on what you pay

Where you are required to deduct withholding tax from a supplier — commonly on professional fees, rent and contracts — the obligation is yours, not theirs. You deduct, you remit by the 21st of the following month, and you issue the credit note that lets the supplier claim it back.

Missing that is a liability that sits with you regardless of what the supplier did, so it belongs in the same place as the bill rather than in someone's memory.