[in_a_society]

This is a standard playbook at large organizations with finance departments. CFO 2 companies ago used to literally coach people on extending payments and delaying. Best case scenario for them, you never get aggressive enough to actually collect. Repeat that at scale across many vendors and suddenly their entire P&L looks substantially better.

[xyst]

The equivalent of “deny, delay, defend” but with smaller companies.

Pumping the books and moving expenses to make the quarter appear good. Practices like this are unethical, should be illegal to hide it.