Why hasn’t a customer paid a signed SaaS invoice?

Check the chain before the customer. Was the vendor packet returned, including the W-9? Did a purchase order issue, and did the invoice carry its number? Was the invoice sent to the accounts payable address or only to the person who signed? Has it been approved for payment? One missing step can hold the invoice without anyone on the customer’s side deciding not to pay.

Should a SaaS invoice include a PO number?

If the customer issues purchase orders, yes. Stripe’s documentation lists PO numbers as a common use of invoice custom fields and notes that custom fields cannot be updated after an invoice finalizes, so the number has to be on the invoice before it goes out.

What does a customer need to set up a new software vendor?

The list differs by customer. It can include a W-9, which the IRS describes as the form a vendor uses to give its correct Taxpayer Identification Number to the person filing an information return, a supplier form, bank details, a security questionnaire and an insurance certificate. Ask the customer’s contact for the list at the order-form stage.

When does net 30 start on an annual SaaS invoice?

It depends on the contract’s wording: invoice date, receipt of the invoice, or approval. Read the payment clause and the customer’s purchase order terms, and count days-to-paid from the bank deposit to see what actually happens.

Can Stripe cancel a subscription when an annual invoice is unpaid?

Yes, if it is set to. For invoices sent with the send_invoice method, Stripe’s documentation lists actions 30, 60 or 90 days after an invoice becomes past due: cancel the subscription, mark it unpaid, or leave it past due. Check which one the account uses.

Who should send recurring invoices: finance or account managers?

Finance, or whoever runs the billing system, should send them, with the account manager copied. Stripe’s documentation says subscriptions generate their own invoices and describes a setting that emails finalized invoices to customers. On the customer record, edited in the Dashboard, one field sets the addresses on the To line and another the CC line: the customer’s accounts payable address goes in To, the account manager and the customer’s champion in CC. The account manager owns what only the relationship can get: the vendor packet, the PO number before the invoice is finalized, and the call when an approval stalls. On a founder-led team both jobs can sit with the founder until the first finance hire takes over the sending side.

Answers · B2B SaaS

Annual SaaS Invoices Stuck in Procurement: The Days Between Signature and Cash

An annual SaaS invoice stuck in procurement is a deal that is signed and not yet paid, waiting on steps that sit between the order form and the customer’s payment run: vendor registration, a W-9, a purchase order number, a supplier portal, an approval in accounts payable. Each step belongs to a different person on the customer’s side, and on a founder-led team they can all land on the founder. None of it is a collections problem yet, because nobody has refused to pay. This guide lays out the chain from signature to cash, what each step waits on, how a billing setup can turn a slow purchase order into a canceled subscription, how to count the days per deal from the company’s own records, and which fixes move the steps to the calendar before the invoice goes out.

By Tamara Stepanyan, founder of Lumina Business Advisory · Updated October 27, 2026 · Sources checked October 17, 2026 · Editorial standards

Why a signed annual SaaS deal is not yet cash

On a card-paid monthly plan, signature and payment are the same moment. On a sales-assisted annual contract paid by invoice, they are separated by a chain the seller does not control. Harris Kenny, founder of OutboundSync, described his largest annual contract on Startups for the Rest of Us in September 2025: “we went through procurement, we went through legal.” At the time of recording, he said of the customer: they “still haven’t paid us yet, but it’s net 30 and hopefully they’re going to pay.” Another founder, writing in to the same show in March 2026, said that “getting internal sign off and budget approval is slow and often is stalling my momentum.”

Two founders’ words are not a count. They describe the shape of the chain, and the chain is the same whatever its length:

Order form signed, by the customer’s budget holder.
Vendor registration: the customer’s supplier form, a W-9, bank details, sometimes a security questionnaire or an insurance certificate.
Purchase order issued, by the customer’s procurement team, against the signed order form.
Invoice sent, carrying the PO number, by email or through a supplier portal.
Invoice approved in accounts payable, matched against the PO and the vendor record.
Payment released on the next payment run, on the terms in the contract.

Each step can wait on the one before it, and the payment terms clock may not start until the last approval. Rob Walling, the show’s host and an investor in early-stage software companies, said of large enterprise deals in a November 2024 episode: “Procurement alone takes 3, 4, 5 months.” A founder selling to mid-sized companies may see a much shorter chain, and the only way to know is to measure it.

The W-9, the PO and the portal: what each step waits on

The W-9 is the IRS form a new vendor fills in for a customer’s accounts payable team. The IRS describes its purpose: “Use Form W-9 to provide your correct Taxpayer Identification Number (TIN) to the person who is required to file an information return with the IRS.” Accounts payable may not create a vendor record without it, and without a vendor record there is nothing to pay. It takes minutes to fill in and can wait days for someone to ask for it.

The purchase order number is a step that can travel back and forth, because an invoice without one may be returned unpaid by an accounts payable team that matches every invoice to a PO. Stripe’s documentation lists “Purchase Order (PO) numbers” as a common use of an invoice’s custom fields, and adds that the custom fields cannot be updated once the invoice finalizes. An invoice finalized without the PO cannot be corrected in place; it is voided and reissued, and the customer’s internal clock may restart with the new invoice.

Supplier portals add a registration of their own, with a login, banking details and documents uploaded again. Whoever on the seller’s side holds that login becomes the only person who can see whether the invoice was received, approved or rejected.

Where billing settings meet a slow procurement queue

An annual subscription billed by invoice in Stripe uses the send_invoice collection method. The documentation describes the payment window and the reminders: the company can “configure up to three reminders, starting at 10 days before the due date and ending at 60 days after.” It can also “take additional action on the subscription 30, 60, or 90 days after an invoice becomes past due,” and the options are “Cancel the subscription,” “Mark the subscription as unpaid,” or “Leave the subscription past due.”

That last setting deserves a look on any account with annual invoiced customers. If it is set to cancel, an invoice waiting on a purchase order for longer than the window can end the subscription of a customer who signed and intends to pay. In the revenue report that shows up as churn, with no conversation behind it. The same documentation notes that Stripe does not send renewal reminder emails for send_invoice subscriptions, which matters at the next renewal; the guide to B2B SaaS auto-renewal notices covers that side.

Automatic reminders also go to whatever email address the invoice was sent to. If that is the champion who signed rather than the accounts payable inbox the customer uses, the reminders land with the one person who cannot release the payment.

The count: days from signature to cash, per annual SaaS deal

The count takes last year’s annual and multi-year deals paid by invoice, with dates pulled from the e-signature tool, the email threads with the customer’s finance team, the billing system and the bank deposits. One row per deal:

Signed date, contract value and payment terms as written, including what starts the clock: invoice date, receipt or approval.
Date the customer’s vendor packet was requested, and date it was returned complete.
Date the PO was requested, and date it arrived.
Date the first invoice was sent, and whether it carried the PO number.
Any invoice voided and reissued, and why.
Date paid, from the bank deposit, not the billing status.
The person on each side who owned each step, by name.

From those dates, four segments fall out: signature to invoice, vendor setup, invoice to approval, approval to cash. Illustrative example: a hypothetical company with 12 annual deals last year finds a median of 9 days from signature to invoice, 21 days for vendor setup, 14 days waiting on a PO, and 38 days from invoice to cash, about 80 days in all on net 30 terms. Three of the 12 invoices went out without a PO and were reissued. The longest segment is where the first fix goes, and the reissued invoices show which step the seller controls.

Calendar fixes that move the steps before the invoice

None of the steps can be skipped, because they belong to the customer. They can be started earlier, and their owner on the seller’s side can be named. The fixes are dates on a calendar, not new software.

At the order-form stage, ask the customer’s contact one question: what does your accounts payable team need to set us up as a supplier? Write the answer into the deal record.
Send the W-9 and the bank details letter with the signed order form, not after the first invoice bounces.
Put a PO number field on the order form, and set it on the customer record in billing so every invoice inherits it.
Do not finalize an invoice for a customer that issues POs until the PO number is on it.
Name one person who owns each annual invoice from send to cash, with a check-in date on the calendar before the due date.
Send invoices and reminders to the accounts payable address the customer gave, with the champion copied.
For renewals, request the next PO before the renewal date, inside the customer’s budget cycle, not after the renewal invoice goes out.
Check the past-due subscription setting in billing, and decide on purpose what happens to an invoiced customer 30, 60 or 90 days past due.

Uneven cash is not peculiar to software. The Federal Reserve Banks’ 2025 Report on Employer Firms, across all industries, says that “More than half of firms cited paying operating expenses (56%) or uneven cash flows (51%) as challenges.” For a SaaS company with a handful of large annual contracts, an 80-day gap between signature and cash on one of them is that unevenness, and it shows up on the bank balance whatever the revenue report says.

When this is not the problem, and where the Review fits

If customers pay by card on monthly plans, there is no procurement chain to count. If annual invoices are paid within terms, the chain works and the time is better spent elsewhere. A single slow customer is a phone call, not a process. And if a customer has stopped answering or disputes what it owes, that is a conversation about the relationship, or with counsel, not a procurement delay.

For a founder-led company, the Revenue Review counts this under the Invoice → Payment hand-off. From read-only exports of the e-signature tool, the billing system and the bank, it rebuilds the dates from signature to cash for every invoiced deal, and lists the invoices sent without a PO, the ones reissued, and the subscriptions a past-due setting would cancel. It takes two weeks, and the report is the company’s to keep.

If the gap looks large, the next step is a free 20-minute call, where we say whether the count above, done in-house, is enough.

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Asked right after

Why hasn’t a customer paid a signed SaaS invoice?: Check the chain before the customer. Was the vendor packet returned, including the W-9? Did a purchase order issue, and did the invoice carry its number? Was the invoice sent to the accounts payable address or only to the person who signed? Has it been approved for payment? One missing step can hold the invoice without anyone on the customer’s side deciding not to pay.
Should a SaaS invoice include a PO number?: If the customer issues purchase orders, yes. Stripe’s documentation lists PO numbers as a common use of invoice custom fields and notes that custom fields cannot be updated after an invoice finalizes, so the number has to be on the invoice before it goes out.
What does a customer need to set up a new software vendor?: The list differs by customer. It can include a W-9, which the IRS describes as the form a vendor uses to give its correct Taxpayer Identification Number to the person filing an information return, a supplier form, bank details, a security questionnaire and an insurance certificate. Ask the customer’s contact for the list at the order-form stage.
When does net 30 start on an annual SaaS invoice?: It depends on the contract’s wording: invoice date, receipt of the invoice, or approval. Read the payment clause and the customer’s purchase order terms, and count days-to-paid from the bank deposit to see what actually happens.
Can Stripe cancel a subscription when an annual invoice is unpaid?: Yes, if it is set to. For invoices sent with the send_invoice method, Stripe’s documentation lists actions 30, 60 or 90 days after an invoice becomes past due: cancel the subscription, mark it unpaid, or leave it past due. Check which one the account uses.
Who should send recurring invoices: finance or account managers?: Finance, or whoever runs the billing system, should send them, with the account manager copied. Stripe’s documentation says subscriptions generate their own invoices and describes a setting that emails finalized invoices to customers. On the customer record, edited in the Dashboard, one field sets the addresses on the To line and another the CC line: the customer’s accounts payable address goes in To, the account manager and the customer’s champion in CC. The account manager owns what only the relationship can get: the vendor packet, the PO number before the invoice is finalized, and the call when an approval stalls. On a founder-led team both jobs can sit with the founder until the first finance hire takes over the sending side.

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