Cash Conversion Assessment
The assessment starts with the movement of cash, not with a single DSO number. A business can report an acceptable headline DSO while a particular channel, customer cohort or approval stage quietly consumes working capital.
Trace the cash journey
Map the interval from commercial commitment to invoice, invoice to acceptance, contractual due date to actual receipt, and—where material—receipt to allocation or reconciliation. The useful question is where time accumulates and whether that delay is structural, episodic or concentrated in a few accounts.
Timing concentration
Separate delay created before invoicing from delay created after invoicing. Late billing and late collection require different owners.
Working-capital pockets
Look for customers, business units and invoice types that consume disproportionate cash despite appearing ordinary in the aggregate.
Release points
Identify the next event that can actually release cash: document acceptance, dispute closure, approval, payment run or escalation.
What management should leave with
The output should distinguish cash trapped by commercial terms from cash trapped by execution. That distinction matters because renegotiating terms will not fix missing acceptance evidence, while stronger collection calls will not fix an invoice that has never entered the customer’s payable process.