Working capital
Working capital is nota finance problem.It is an execution problem.
Cash does not sit still because treasury decided it should. It sits still because an order was blocked, a delivery was never confirmed, an invoice went out wrong, or a cost was never converted into something billable. Each of those is a step in a process, and each one is recorded.
What the working capital report shows
- DSO, DPO and the trend against target
- Aged balances, sorted into buckets
- The total amount tied up
What execution shows
- The steps where the days accumulate
- Why each item entered the bucket it is in
- Which cases are still moving and which have stopped
A working capital metric tells you how much, and how long. Execution tells you where, and why.
The attribution gap
Finance can see the balance.Only execution shows the delay behind it.
An aged receivable is the end of a story that started weeks earlier — a credit block nobody cleared, a delivery confirmation that never posted, a price the customer disputes, an invoice raised against the wrong entity. By the time the balance reaches an ageing report, its cause is several systems and several teams away, and the collections team is left chasing a symptom. The evidence has not gone anywhere. It was written, step by step, by the systems that processed the work.
What the evidence looks like
Terms are a negotiation. The rest is a process.
One order to cash cycle, measured end to end on the calendar rather than from the invoice date. The stages below are what the customer's clock actually recorded.
Operational stagesContractual termsDays produced by blocks, rework and disputes
Thirty of these days were negotiated. Fifteen and a half were not. Renegotiating terms is slow, political and reciprocal. The 15.5 days sit inside processes you already control, and each one is attributable to a specific block, reissue or dispute.
How it works
Measure, separate, locate, release
Four steps in order. The second one is what makes the exercise useful — until the terms are separated out, every conversation about the cycle turns into a conversation about renegotiating with customers.
The full cycle, on the calendar
How long does cash actually take?Reconstruct the cycle end to end across every system that touched it — from the order, requisition or project being raised, not from the date the invoice was cut.
Terms apart from execution
Which days did we agree to?Split the days that come from contractual terms from the days produced by how the work ran. Only the second group is yours to act on this quarter.
Attribute every day to a step
Where exactly are they?Trace the execution days back to the specific hold, reissue, dispute or missing confirmation that produced them — and to how much cash sits behind each pattern.
Fix, then re-measure
Did the cash actually move?Take the largest pattern first, then run the same measurement again to confirm the days came out of the cycle rather than moving to a different stage.
Where cash gets stuck
Four places, none of them on an ageing report
Working capital is not only receivables. Cash is held on both sides of the cycle, and in the gap between money already spent and value not yet converted.
Blocks and holds
Credit checks that nobody cleared, stock allocation waiting on a decision, incomplete customer or material data stopping an order before anything moves.
Billing lag and reissues
The gap between goods issued and invoice raised, plus invoices cancelled and re-cut. Days lost here are invisible, because the clock most reports use starts at the invoice.
Disputes and query loops
Invoices the customer will not pay yet — wrong price, wrong entity, missing purchase order, short delivery — and the correspondence loop each one starts.
Cost not yet converted
Payments made earlier than terms required, and spend committed to projects or work in progress that has not yet become a billable item or an asset in service.
How RE-ViVE helps
Start with the execution evidence you already have
RE-ViVE measures the cash cycle from the operational records your systems already write — the same transaction and workflow data behind the balances finance is already reporting.
Measured, not modelled
The cycle comes out of timestamps rather than out of a terms table and an assumption about how long each stage should take.
No new instrumentation
Use the operational data already generated across ERP, billing, fulfilment and workflow. No changes to production applications.
Days with an owner attached
Every day in the cycle is attributed to a step and a team, so the release plan has actions rather than a target percentage.
Re-measure to confirm release
Run the same measurement after the fix and check the days left the cycle instead of relocating to the stage next door.
Where it applies
Every cycle where money and process move together
The pattern is the same wherever cash depends on a sequence of steps completing: measure the whole cycle, separate what was agreed from what was accumulated.
Order to cash
Credit and delivery blocks, the lag between goods issue and invoice, billing rework and the dispute loops that hold otherwise collectable balances.
Procure to pay
Approval and exception delays pushing payments outside terms, alongside the invoices paid earlier than they needed to be — cash out for no commercial reason.
Project to asset in service
Committed and actual project spend that has not been capitalised, and completed work not yet placed in service — cost sitting on the balance sheet without producing anything.
Stock to fulfilment
Stock allocated against orders that are held, and the ageing that follows when the release decision sits with a team that never sees the balance.
Next steps
Terms are renegotiated once a year.Execution decides the rest of the cycle.
Choose one cycle — receivables, payables or capital spend. We will measure it end to end from data you already hold, and separate the days you agreed to from the days your process added.