With rumors that Zale Corp. has stopped paying some of its vendors, Zale is countering that the delays simply result from a new procedure.

Spokesman David Sternblitz notes that the company now has certain challenges, since most of its vendors cannot get credit insurance because of restrictions from their financial institutions, so they are selling on C.O.D. So Zale has offered many of its suppliers “accelerated payments.”

The different financing arrangements have “made a systematic process more manual and required us to more tightly manage the timing of our outflows with inflows,” Sternblitz says.