Spanish mid-sized and large companies take, on average, 50.25 days to collect payments from customers, but only 29.42 days to pay suppliers. A 21-day gap that, at first glance, might seem like a simple calendar mismatch, but in practice translates into one of the main sources of liquidity stress in the business landscape.
Companies themselves are effectively financing their customers without realizing it, taking on a financing cost that in many cases they don’t even recognize as such. This is revealed by the data from Embat’s Treasury Monitor. The figures, corresponding to the first quarter of 2026, offer a real-world, behavior-based snapshot of the state of receivables and payables in Spanish companies, not based on surveys.
A liquidity gap that accounting doesn’t reflect
The problem has a structural dimension that macroeconomic data confirm. According to CEPYME’s Delinquency Observatory, the average payment term among private companies remains 34% above the limit set by the Late Payments Law. Only 15% of large companies paid within legal deadlines in 2025, compared with 26% in the previous year, and the total financial cost associated with these delays exceeded €5.568 billion, of which nearly €2.0 billion corresponded exclusively to SMEs.
“The Embat data are especially relevant because they measure the direct consequence of that gap on the cash flow. The 21-day difference between collecting and paying not only means a company is financing its customers; it does so without interest, without collateral, and, in many cases, without visibility into exactly when that money will arrive,” explains Carlos Serrano, co-CEO of Embat.
The overdraft as a symptom, virtually a monthly episode
The most immediate consequence appears in the overdraft data. In the first quarter of 2026, according to Embat’s analysis, companies went into the red an average of 1.53 times per company, accumulating 22.8 days in overdraft. In practice, in each of the three months of the quarter there was at least one liquidity stress episode per company.
«The overdraft is the symptom, not the illness. The illness is not knowing in real time how much money is coming in, when it comes in, and how much goes out. Many companies realize they’re under liquidity stress only when it’s already too late to react», points out Serrano.
Technology as the antidote
Moreover, Spanish companies pay suppliers with an average delay of 14.42 days in the first quarter of 2026, placing them 1.3 days above the European average, confirming that the problem is not just internal management but also a culture of payment.
In response to this landscape, market sentiment is turning toward automation and artificial intelligence. According to Embat’s own report on the use of AI in treasury, 50% of financial executives highlight the reduction of time spent on repetitive tasks as the main benefit of incorporating these technologies into their processes, freeing up capacity to proactively forecast and manage liquidity.
«The problem isn’t that companies collect late. The problem is that their cash flow forecasts assume customers will pay when they should, not when they actually do. With technology that analyzes each counterparty’s historical payment behavior and automatically adjusts projections, the finance team stops managing liquidity on paper and starts managing it in reality. That difference, in practice, is what separates firms that anticipate liquidity strains from those that discover them only once they show up as overdrafts,» notes Carlos Serrano.
