Weekends and the Two Calendars
Two countries have two sets of working days, and a payment only moves when both ends are open.
Still yours, and statedTaken, never statedUnit changes; scale restarts
Five steps from instruction to arrival. One step carries no figure: the hatching marks where the money leaves and is not drawn to scale, because there is no figure to draw. Nothing here adds them up, since an amount you cannot see is not an amount you can subtract. Bars here are days remaining, not money: the one that took longest has no stated duration at all.
A payment moves on days when the systems handling it are open. Two countries have two sets of working days, and where they do not overlap the money simply waits.
The timing problem in “Weekends and the Two Calendars” is easier to investigate when approval and payment events have separate timestamps. When teams assess continue here for the full explanation for workload management, time and project records can identify whether work was approved before the payment cut-off without pretending to explain delays inside the banking route.
For most corridors that means Saturday and Sunday. For some it means something else entirely, and that catches people out badly.
The questions in “Weekends and the Two Calendars” can also be checked against Payments Canada resources. Use the outside resource to identify what evidence to request rather than assuming one provider sees the whole payment chain.
Where the weekend is not Saturday
A payment between a Monday-to-Friday country and a Sunday-to-Thursday one has four overlapping working days a week, not five. Nothing announces this and nothing in any tracking system labels a delay as caused by it.
A payment between a Monday-to-Friday country and one of these has four overlapping working days a week rather than five.
That is a twenty per cent reduction in the days anything can happen, and it compounds with every other delay in this section.
What the overlap actually means
Instructions, settlement and crediting each need the relevant system open. A payment instructed on a day that is a working day at one end and not the other sits until both are.
The effective transit time is measured in shared working days, not in calendar days, and that distinction is where most surprise comes from.
Half days
Some markets close early on particular days, and several close early before major holidays. An afternoon cut-off becomes a morning one without announcement.
Where your corridor has these, they are worth knowing once. Nobody tells you and they recur annually.
They cluster around the same points each year, which makes them easy to note once and then forget about safely.
Friday instructions
The worst ordinary choice on a standard corridor. A payment instructed on Friday afternoon, after the cut-off, does not begin moving until Monday.
Add one correspondent and a holiday and a Friday instruction routinely arrives the following Thursday.
Why Tuesday
An instruction on Tuesday has three working days in front of it before a weekend. A one-day slip costs a day rather than three.
It is a free improvement, it requires nothing of anybody, and it is the most reliable piece of advice in this section.
Month-end falling on a weekend
A payment due on the last day of the month, where that day is a Saturday, is instructed either on the Friday before or the Monday after, depending on how the payer's system is configured.
Ask which. The two answers differ by three days and nobody considers it worth mentioning.
Your own bank's crediting days
Receiving banks process incoming credits on working days too. A payment that settles on a Friday evening may not appear until Monday.
That final gap is invisible in any tracking system, because as far as the chain is concerned the payment arrived.
It is also the gap people most often attribute to the sender, who by that point has had nothing to do with the payment for several days.
Weekends in the middle
On a multi-hop route the money can be sitting at a correspondent over a weekend in a third country whose calendar neither party thought about.
This is the explanation for a surprising number of otherwise inexplicable delays, and nothing in the trace will label it.
Building the two calendars
One list each of the working days at both ends, for the year. Ten minutes once.
With it, the expected arrival date for any instruction date can be worked out in advance, which turns chasing into planning.
Raising the date with them
Where their chosen date reliably falls badly, say so with the arithmetic rather than as a complaint.
"The 30th is a Saturday in three months this year, and each time the payment arrives on the 6th" is a sentence that gets a date changed.
Planning your own side around it
Where income arrives on a corridor with four shared working days, the buffer in your own planning needs to be larger than it would be domestically.
That is a fact about the arrangement rather than a failing of anybody's, and treating it as normal is less stressful than treating each occurrence as a problem.
What the calendars cannot predict
A closure nobody anticipated: a national day of mourning, an unscheduled banking holiday, a systems outage at one institution.
These happen, they are not forecastable, and no amount of calendar work covers them. What calendar work does is remove the delays that were predictable all along, which is the great majority of them, and leave a much smaller residue of genuine surprises.
It also changes the tone of the conversation with a payer, because a delay you predicted is a planning matter and a delay you did not is a complaint.