Early-Payment Discount Optimizer: Know Which 2/10 Net 30 Discounts Are Actually Worth Taking

The problem this kills

Somewhere in your open payables right now is free money you're about to leave on the table. A vendor offers "2/10 net 30" — pay within 10 days and take 2% off. That sounds small, but as an annualized return it's roughly 37%, which beats almost anything else you could do with the cash. The problem is nobody has the time to do that math on every invoice, every week, by hand.

So discounts get missed. Or worse — someone pays everything early to grab the discounts and drains the cash the business needed for payroll. The decision that actually matters — "is this discount worth more than what the cash is worth to us right now?" — gets made on gut feel, if it gets made at all. You don't need to be a developer to put a clear, defensible number behind that decision.

What you'll build

A simple internal web tool for your payables team. You import your open payables (vendor, amount, terms, invoice date). The tool reads each vendor's terms — "2/10 net 30", "1/15 net 45", "net 30", whatever shapes show up in your data — and works out two things for every invoice: the discount in real dollars, and the annualized yield of paying early (so you can compare it apples-to-apples against your cost of cash). It ranks the opportunities by value, flags the ones about to expire, and marks each one "take it" or "skip it" based on the hurdle rate you set. The controller reviews the recommended early-pay list and approves which discounts to actually capture given the cash position. On approval, the tool exports a clean early-pay schedule — ready to feed straight into your payment run — plus a record of the savings you captured.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The downloadable plan is a step-by-step file you paste into an AI coding agent. It opens by interviewing you about your business — your accounting system, the exact columns in your payables export, how your vendors actually write their terms, what your cost of cash is, when you cut payments, and your real approval rules — so the tool fits your payables, not a generic template. From there it walks the agent through the data model, the import, the terms parser, the yield math, the ranking and expiry flags, the controller's approval gate, and the schedule export. Every step ends with a ready-to-copy prompt. There's also a "No API yet?" path: import a CSV from your accounting system and export a clean early-pay schedule CSV, so you can build and use the whole thing today with zero integration.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This decides where real cash goes, so the plan builds in the controls a finance team needs: login so only your team can use it; row-level security so you only ever see your own organization's invoices; a complete audit trail of who imported, computed, approved, and exported what, and when; a hard human-approval gate where the controller signs off on exactly which discounts to capture before any early-pay schedule is produced; and duplicate guards keyed on invoice ID so the same invoice can never be scheduled — or paid early — twice.

Who it's for

Controllers, treasury staff, and AP leads who manage payables timing and want to stop guessing which early-pay discounts are worth it. If you can read a vendor's terms off an invoice and tell me roughly what your cash costs, you can build this.

You've got this — start with the plan, paste the first prompt, and answer a few questions about your payables. Your first ranked list of discounts worth taking is one afternoon away.