Riyadh is fixing how suppliers get paid. The delay sits upstream.
On 20 September, Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund launched Tawrid, a digital platform that lets suppliers in the Kingdom receive early settlement on their invoices rather than wait for the buyer's payment date. Saudi National Bank, Banque Saudi Fransi and Gulf International Bank signed on at launch, alongside two large buyers, the developer ROSHN and the contractor Nesma & Partners. Six weeks earlier, on 5 August, the Council of Ministers had approved a new Government Tenders and Procurement Law. One clause in it deserves more attention than it has received. A government entity must now settle what it owes the private sector on time before it may enter into new contracts.
A note on timing: the new law was published in the official gazette on 4 September 2026 and comes into force 120 days later, on 2 January 2027 (Baker McKenzie, 21 October 2026. Al Tamimi & Co). Until then, the current procurement rules apply.
Most of the commentary drew the natural conclusion. Payment in Saudi Arabia is getting faster, and the old stories of suppliers waiting half a year are coming to an end.
I would read the announcements more slowly. Look at what Tawrid actually finances. Not issued invoices. Approved invoices.
That one word is the whole lesson.
Four Desks Before the Bank
A Gulf invoice that stalls is rarely waiting on a friend. It is waiting inside an institutional approval chain, a system doing exactly what it was built to do, at its own speed. The last two months have simply made that chain easier to see.
A Nordic finance director tends to think of a receivable as a single interval. Invoice sent, sixty days, cash received. A Gulf government receivable is a relay with four legs, and the term in the contract measures only the last one.
The first leg is the milestone. The work is finished, but the contract decides what "finished" means, and that is rarely as simple as delivery. The second is certification: an engineer, a project consultant or a committee inside the buying entity inspects the work and signs. The third is the payment order, which the entity raises and sends to the Ministry of Finance. Only then does the fourth leg begin. That is the one everyone negotiates.
The Ministry's own figures show exactly where its clock starts. In January 2019 it reported that 99 per cent of "properly submitted payment orders" had been paid within sixty days, and 97 per cent within thirty. It is a strong record. It is also a record of the fourth leg alone. The weeks your invoice spends reaching that desk do not appear in the statistic, because until then the system does not yet recognise it as something owed.
The term you negotiate begins after the delay you do not.
The Pen Before the Purse
The Kingdom has lived through the harder version of this story. After oil prices fell in 2014, payments to contractors slowed sharply through 2015 and into 2016. The chief financial officer of Parsons, the American engineering group, said at the time that payments had "dried up entirely" for a period. Yet when the chief executive of Al Khodari, a listed Saudi contractor, explained the delays, he pointed less to empty coffers than to documentation that was slow to reach the Ministry and to bureaucratic holdups in some departments.
The state answered with scale. By mid-September 2017 it reported paying SAR 525 billion across roughly 345,000 invoices, with 98 per cent settled within forty-five days. But the lesson that outlived the crisis was sharper than any total. Money was not the only bottleneck. The paper before the money was.
Before calling that bureaucracy, remember where the region's word for a government office comes from. The diwan, in its earliest form under the second caliph, was a register of who was owed what from the public treasury. From the start it was a record of obligation, kept by officials who could be asked to account for it. That instinct has travelled a long way. When an official answers personally for public money, a signature is a risk taken by a named person. A missing stamp, a test report available only in English, a milestone certificate whose wording drifts from the contract: each gives that person a legitimate reason to wait. It is not obstruction. It is self-protection, and it is entirely rational.
Be fair about the direction of this, because it runs both ways. The North solved the same problem from the opposite end. Since 1 April 2019, Sweden has required suppliers to its public buyers to send structured electronic invoices, and the national procurement agency is explicit that a PDF does not count. The Nordic states automated the approval so that payment could follow without a human decision. The Gulf states are now automating the payment, while approval remains a human act. A Gulf supplier who emails a scanned invoice to a Swedish municipality will learn the mirror lesson quickly.
In Stockholm, a PDF is not an invoice. In Riyadh, an invoice is not yet a receivable.
Where the Advantage Moves
Now put the three recent measures side by side. The new procurement law ties an entity's future contracts to paying its current dues on time. The Saudi Central Bank opened consultation on 26 August on rules for supply-chain finance and the firms that provide it. Tawrid gives suppliers a route to cash against invoices that are already approved. Every one of these tools works on the fourth leg. None of them touches the first three.
My base case is that this makes the upstream legs more important, not less. An entity that now faces a real consequence for paying late has every reason to be precise about when a payment actually falls due, and the due date turns on approval. A bank offering early settlement will price the approved invoice as the buyer's risk and everything before approval as yours. The end of the road is becoming faster and more predictable. The advantage passes to whoever moves through the beginning cleanly.
Atradius's survey of UAE companies, carried out in the second quarter of this year, found that around two in five business-to-business invoices were paid late, and that buyers' own cash-flow constraints were the most common reason. You cannot fix a customer's liquidity. You can make sure that when the cash is there, your invoice is the one already cleared to receive it.
So before delivery begins, a Nordic supplier should be able to answer three questions without hesitation. Which document releases each payment, and who signs it? Is that document, and everything attached to it, ready in the form and the language the signer needs? And how many unpaid days can our own balance sheet carry if the first three legs take longer than we hope? The new rules do not change the underlying arithmetic. The important number is not the payment term. It is the number of unpaid days your own balance sheet can survive.
Who Should Bid Now
This path suits a supplier whose balance sheet can carry a long first cycle, with a local partner who understands how certification moves inside the buying entity, and the patience to treat the first project as the price of a clean record. For those companies, the new rules are good news. A predictable last leg makes the whole relay easier to finance.
It does not suit a scaleup selling milestone-based projects to government entities with a few months of cash in the bank. For that company, a faster fourth leg changes little if the first three can still take a quarter. Entering through an established local prime contractor may be the wiser course. Declining a tender you cannot finance is not a lack of ambition. It is arithmetic.
And keep the other channel open. A good relationship cannot approve your certificate, but it can find out where the certificate is sitting, and a polite call at the right level will do what a month of reminder emails cannot. The documents get you paid. The relationship tells you why you have not been paid yet. You need both.
Riyadh is making the money move faster. The approval still moves at the pace of the person who signs. Before your next Gulf bid, ask your team one question: who certifies our first milestone, and what will they need on the desk to sign it without hesitation?
This article first appeared on LinkedIn. Saudi Arabia's Ministry of Finance reports paying 99 per cent of properly submitted payment orders within sixty days. The two words that matter are properly submitted.