A 90 Lakhs That's Missing From Your Bank Account

The average Indian MSME is owed nearly 90 lakhs that's sat unpaid for over a year. If some of that number is yours, this is for you.

Let me start with a figure that should make every business owner sit up.

The average Indian MSME is currently carrying around 90 lakhs in receivables that have been unpaid for more than a year. Not 30 days, not 90. More than three hundred and sixty days. And the typical invoice now takes about 75 days to actually get settled even though most businesses issue their invoices on terms of 30 days or less.

Read that again. You're offering a 30-day rope. Your customers are taking 75. And a chunk of what they owe you has effectively gone to sleep.

This isn't a "them" problem. It's the whole ecosystem.

If you felt a small flush of recognition just now—the client who always pays "next week," the big buyer whose payment you've mentally written off as "whenever it comes"—and you're not badly run. You're normal. This is happening to lakhs of businesses at once. The government even mandates payment to small enterprises within 45 days, and there's a whole grievance platform, MSME Samadhaan, groaning under lakhs of pending claims worth tens of thousands of crores. The rule exists precisely because the problem is everywhere.

But here's the trap in treating it as normal and you stop tracking it closely and what you stop tracking, you stop collecting.

The three quiet ways this money slips away:

1. You don't know the real number. Ask most owners how much they're owed and you'll get a guess. You can't chase what you can't see clearly. Last week when we asked Mr. Akash Jain who owns a marble company one simple question: "How much is the overdue of your debtors past 60 days?" He was silent... And his answer was, "woh kaise pata karu!!"
2. You chase late, or emotionally. Without a system, follow-ups happen when cash gets tight or when you happen to remember, not on a schedule. And by the time a receivable is a year old, it's not a reminder anymore. It's a fight.
3. As you fund the gap with your own money or expensive debt. When your cash is trapped in other people's accounts, you plug the hole with an overdraft, a loan, or your own savings—paying interest to cover money you've already earned.

The fix has two halves, and you need both

See it. A live dashboard built on your Tally data shows you exactly who owes what, aged and ranked, updated automatically. Chasing becomes a routine, not a scramble. Money at 30 days overdue is a polite nudge; money at a year is a lawyer. The whole game is catching it early.

Unlock it. For the receivables that are legitimate but slow, invoice discounting converts the unpaid invoice into cash now, instead of borrowing against your business to cover the gap.

The number you should actually know by heart

Not your revenue. Not your profit. Your overdue receivables, aged by customer—because that's your own money, sitting in someone else's account, and every day it stays there is a day it's financing their business instead of yours.