I worked for Airgas years ago doing AR reconciliations and I recall once getting a letter from a fairly large customer that they were henceforth going to pay us Net 120. So I set their account to COD as they were already as much as 180 past due on a number of invoices.
Their CEO called me personally to bitch about it and I told him that if he needed a loan to do business that he needed to see a banker and that my company was not in the loan business.
So they paid us up to current, returned our cylinders, and took their business to Air Liquide.
And filed Chapter 13 about six months later and hosed Air Liquide out of a bundle of money - I got a nice atta-boy from my firm and an excellent reference when I moved on to my next job. I did the right thing then and, IMHO, Sprint is doing the right thing, too.
Their CEO called me personally to bitch about it and I told him that if he needed a loan to do business that he needed to see a banker and that my company was not in the loan business.
So they paid us up to current, returned our cylinders, and took their business to Air Liquide.
And filed Chapter 13 about six months later and hosed Air Liquide out of a bundle of money - I got a nice atta-boy from my firm and an excellent reference when I moved on to my next job. I did the right thing then and, IMHO, Sprint is doing the right thing, too.
That mirrors a half dozen experiences we went through in the late 1990’s with clients we fired. Most, if not all, went belly up, leaving somebody else holding the deficit.
To me, when I see that kind of lagging payments, its a HUGE red flag.