Your cash is stuck in invoices.
We unstick it.
Independent research and advisory on the invoice-to-cash chain, for B2B companies from $50M to $1B in revenue.
20+ years in financial operations. Founded PayStream Advisors. Product leadership at Paymentus, AvidXchange, and Corpay.
Everyone knows their DSO. Almost nobody knows which handoff owns it.
Take your ten slowest-paid invoices from last month. For each one, write down five dates: delivered, invoiced, received by the customer, approved, paid.
The gap that repeats is your real bottleneck. In most companies it is not collections. It sits somewhere in the days between delivering the work and getting a correctly submitted invoice in front of the right approver, and no single person owns it.
Where the invoice-to-cash chain breaks
Seven handoffs sit between finished work and cash in the bank. Each one can add days. Only one of them is collections.
Delivery to billable event
The work is done. The system does not know it yet.
Billable event to invoice
Data assembled from three places, one of them a spreadsheet.
Invoice to customer receipt
Email, EDI, or a buyer portal that rejects it silently.
Receipt to approval
Your invoice enters someone else's AP workflow and disappears.
Approval to payment run
Their calendar, not yours.
Payment to cash applied
Short pays, remittance detail that does not match, unapplied credits.
Exception to resolution
Disputes that are really pricing problems, routed to collections.
Days hide in 02, 03, and 06. Most improvement projects target 07.
What slow cash actually costs you
Revenue leakage
Net 30 becomes Net 60 or worse. Late fees go uncollected. Cash sits in invoices instead of working capital.
Every day of delay costs you carrying capacity and growth investment.
Labor cost escalation
Manual financial processes require expensive headcount. Exception handling eats the productivity of the people you can least afford to waste.
You cannot scale the back-office without linear headcount growth. Your competitors can.
Valuation drag
Competitors run leaner finance ops. Their cash cycles are faster and their cost structures are lower.
Manual processes are becoming a discount at the negotiating table.
Two ways to work together
Diagnose it
A fixed-scope diagnostic. I map your seven handoffs against your own data, quantify the days and the dollars sitting in each, and hand you a ranked fix list with sequencing. No implementation commitment and no pitch deck.
Fix it
Invoice-to-cash redesign, with your team and your existing vendors wherever possible. Billing data quality, invoice delivery, dispute routing, collections prioritization, and cash application wired to work together. I stay through the part where behavior actually changes, because that is the part that fails.
I also work with fintechs and investors on buyer intelligence, positioning, and commercial diligence. For fintechs and investors →
AI readiness, stated plainly
AI will transform financial operations. For most mid-market companies it is not ready to yet, because the foundations are not there. Bad invoice data plus an AI agent gets you wrong answers faster, and an autopilot collections bot emailing customers who already paid. Knowing which of these is ready today is most of the value.
Ready now
Dispute classification. Collection email drafting. Payment delay prediction. Duplicate invoice detection. Intelligent escalation.
Clear ROI. A CFO understands it immediately.
Needs data work first
Cash forecasting. Working capital diagnostics. Variance explanation. Automated vendor onboarding. Contract term extraction.
Fix the inputs and these become real.
Should stay human
Credit decisions on marginal accounts. Relationship-sensitive escalation. Anything where being wrong costs you a customer.
Judgment is not an automation target.
20 years on both sides of this problem
Commercial lending at Citi, where I learned how businesses actually move money. Payment systems consulting at EY. Then fifteen years running PayStream Advisors, the leading research and advisory firm in AP automation and B2B payments, through to its sale to Endava. After that, product leadership at Paymentus, AvidXchange, and Corpay, which is where I learned what the vendors can and cannot actually deliver.
I have sat on the buy side, the sell side, and the analyst side of the same problem.
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The Velocity Stack
Finance ops intelligence twice a week. Payments, ERP, and where the cash actually gets stuck. Free.
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