A program your city can offer to local businesses.

A turnkey program. No headcount, no budget, no process change.

“The city pays the same invoices it was already going to pay, on the same schedule. Lunch is just an option offered to vendors in between.”

You already field requests to do more for local businesses. Lunch is a clean way to say yes — without standing up a new program, hiring against a new line item, or adding work to your departments.

• Two weeks of setup, then it runs itself.

  A one-time invoice-data connection from AP. After that, no ongoing work for any of your teams.

• No fiscal note.

  No cost to the city. No new budget line. No procurement RFP for our service.

• A clear story for council.

  Visible support for local businesses, with audit-clean mechanics. We supply the briefing materials.

No cost. No debt. No change to AP, audit trail, or 1099 reporting.

Lunch is structured as a true sale of receivables from your vendors to Lunch. Your city is not a borrower, a guarantor, or a counterparty to any financing instrument. The program does not touch your debt capacity, your credit rating, or your treasury operations.

• Free to the city, always.

  Lunch is paid by the vendors who choose to use it, only on the invoices they choose to accelerate. There is no city-side fee, subscription, or minimum.

• Your AP workflow is unchanged.

  Same approval workflow. Same payment schedule. Same payment address — your AP system pays Lunch instead of the original vendor on the invoices the vendor accelerated.

• 1099 reporting unchanged.

  Your finance office continues to issue 1099s to the original vendor. Lunch handles its own tax reporting on the discount it earns, separately.

• Prompt-payment compliance unchanged.

  Lunch is structured so your obligations under prompt-payment statutes and procurement codes are unchanged. Standard assignment notices and accounting guidance available for your CFO and outside counsel.

More bidders. Better prices. Stronger small-business participation.

Cash-flow constraints are the most common reason small vendors stop pursuing government contracts. An always-on early-payment option keeps them in your bidder pool — which means more competition on every solicitation.

• More bidders, lower prices.

  Industry research consistently shows that contract pricing improves materially when three or more vendors bid versus one or two. Lunch is one of the few interventions that addresses the upstream cause: cash flow.

• Direct support for DBE, SBE, and MWBE goals.

  Cash flow is the #1 reason small and disadvantaged business enterprises decline or step down government contracts. By giving them the option of immediate payment, more of them can bid, perform, and stay on contract.

• No exclusivity. No competing financing.

  Vendors keep all their existing options — banks, factors, lines of credit, no financing at all. Lunch is one more option, available invoice by invoice, with no commitment.

• No RFP needed.

  Because Lunch is paid by vendors and is free to the city, our service typically falls outside the threshold for competitive procurement. We provide a sole-source justification template if your code requires one.

Build local commercial credit, year over year.

“Credit-building is the most durable, most differentiated outcome of the program. The cash flow benefit is real, but the credit profile is what compounds.”

The most durable thing the program does is not the cash itself — it is the credit history. Each invoice paid through Lunch is reported to commercial credit bureaus, building each vendor’s commercial credit profile over time. That is the asset that grows.

• Stronger vendors, year over year.

  Over a few cycles, your local vendors qualify for larger bonds, better insurance rates, and bigger contracts — both from your city and from the rest of their customer mix.

• Reportable outcomes for your office.

  We can share program-level data with your office on participation, paydown speed, and credit-profile growth across the local vendor base.

• A genuine local-multiplier story.

  Faster payments mean faster payroll and faster reinvestment in the community you serve. The dollar your city was going to pay anyway gets to work weeks earlier.

Visible support for local business. No fiscal note. Clean story.

A program your office can announce, point to, and tell a coherent story about — without committing budget, hiring, or asking departments to take on new work.

• No fiscal note. No budget impact.

  Free to the city, structured as a true sale, no debt or contingent liability. Nothing for the budget office to score.

• A clean narrative.

  The city pays its vendors on its normal schedule. Vendors who want to be paid sooner have that option. The dollars compound into stronger local businesses over time.

• Briefing materials and talking points.

  We supply council-ready briefing materials, FAQ, and press-release language your office can adapt for your community.