What 400+ credit and finance leaders told us about order-to-cash

Every credit leader eventually gets to the same place: the actual work is fine. It's everything happening around it that's the problem. The application, the decision, the invoice, all of it is straightforward on its own. What eats the day is everything in between.

There’s a pattern. A supplier onboards a customer, makes a credit decision, manages the order, invoices, and reconciles, often across systems that were never built to talk to each other. That same customer is running the other half of the same transaction in systems of their own. Two companies, two different tool stacks, the same single transaction.

Because there's rarely a system connection, things like identity data, trade references, purchase orders, and remittances all still move by phone call, email, fax, and spreadsheet. So when a payment comes in with no invoice number attached, someone is forced to track down the details. They open the customer's file, check the last few invoices, and email the customer's accounts payable team to ask which one the payment belongs to. Days pass, which may be long enough to hold up the customer’s next order.

We hear versions of this constantly from the leaders we talk to. They know it’s a bottleneck, but it never really registers as a priority problem to fix. It's just what every day looks like. What nobody had was real numbers on how often it happens or what it actually costs, so we ran a survey to find out.

More than 400 credit, AR, and finance leaders answered questions about their real, day-to-day order-to-cash process. Not which systems they use, but what actually happens: how long a credit decision actually takes, how often they're chasing down information just to close a payment or resolve a dispute, and whether any of the investment is actually helping.

But the way people describe their own process is vastly different than what they're actually doing every single day. Almost nobody calls what they're doing manual, yet they’re all still doing so much of this process by hand, every week.

This contradiction comes up throughout the whole report. Bigger teams hit the same wall as small ones. It explains why more headcount hasn't fixed this, why more software hasn't either, and why the fix probably isn't what most teams think of first.

Check out the full report to see exactly where order-to-cash is breaking, what it's actually costing teams, and what credit and finance leaders say would help most.

We're also hosting a live discussion on the data on October 8—register here if you want to talk through what we found with us.