Process Consulting
From the order placed to the cash collected
Order-to-cash is the end-to-end process that begins when a customer places an order and ends when the payment for that order is in your bank—order entry, fulfillment, invoicing, payment processing, cash application, and collections. We map yours, find where cash gets stuck, and rebuild the handoffs so revenue converts faster with fewer errors.
This is the work FreeProcesses started in: process reengineering. For recurring-revenue and e-commerce businesses, we bring it to the cycle that decides your cash position—backed by the same APIs, webhooks, and CPA-reviewed books behind our bookkeeping and sales tax work.
Each stage hands off to the next. Cash leaks at the handoffs—an order captured without terms, an invoice sent three days late, a payment nobody applied.
Orders captured from your storefront, CPQ, self-service portal, marketplace, or partner network—with customer, pricing, term, and delivery detail complete the first time.
Goods picked, packed, and shipped, or subscriptions and entitlements provisioned—so what the customer ordered is what actually gets delivered and billed.
Consolidated invoices across one-time charges, usage, services, and subscriptions—with the right taxes applied and terms that match the contract.
Cards, ACH, wires, and checks—captured in the currencies you sell in, with retries and dunning for failed recurring charges.
Payments matched to invoices, deposits reconciled to processor settlements, and the bank tied out to the ledger without manual spreadsheet work.
Aging reviewed on a schedule, reminders sent before an invoice goes past due, disputes escalated early, and bad debt written off deliberately—not by surprise.
Three cycles get used interchangeably and shouldn't be. Knowing which one you're fixing keeps an engagement from sprawling.
Order in, cash out. Order entry, fulfillment, invoicing, receivables, payment, and cash application. This is where collection speed lives.
Everything in O2C plus what comes before the order: quoting, negotiation, and contract creation. Contract lifecycle management belongs here—not in O2C.
The mirror image, pointed at suppliers: sourcing, purchase orders, receiving, and paying vendors. Same discipline, opposite end of the cash cycle.
Six failure patterns account for most of the delay we find. We look for them first because they're the ones that quietly cost you weeks of cash.
Bad addresses, wrong pricing, and missing terms at order entry become credit memos, re-bills, and delayed collections weeks later.
Nobody can say where an order is—or why an invoice hasn't gone out—so problems surface only when a customer complains or the month closes short.
Re-keying orders, building invoices one at a time, and applying cash by hand—slow, error-prone, and impossible to scale with headcount.
Subscriptions, usage-based charges, bundles, hardware, services, and promos all billed from the same system—without breaking rating or invoicing.
Storefront, billing, payments, tax, and the general ledger each holding a different version of the truth, reconciled by spreadsheet.
Deferred revenue and recognition schedules maintained manually, so close takes longer every quarter as the business grows.
We baseline these before we change anything, then report them on a dashboard you keep. If the numbers don't move, the engagement didn't work.
How long it actually takes to collect—the headline number every engagement is measured against.
How far past terms your overdue balances run, separated from ordinary payment timing.
Hours or days between fulfillment and an invoice landing in the customer's inbox.
How fast an order moves from placed to shipped or provisioned.
Share of billed revenue collected on time, by segment, channel, and payment method.
How long a disputed invoice sits before it is credited, corrected, or collected.
The portion of billings that never converts to cash—tracked, not absorbed silently.
How quickly a sale turns into usable cash across inventory, receivables, and payables.
Advice you can't run isn't worth much. Every engagement ends with working integrations, documented procedures, and a dashboard—not a slide deck.
Your current cycle documented stage by stage, with owners, systems, handoffs, and elapsed time at each step. We show where days are lost and what each one costs you in working capital.
Order, invoice, payment, and settlement data flowing between your storefront, billing, payment processors, tax engine, and QuickBooks or Xero via APIs and webhooks—event-driven, no CSV exports, no re-keying.
Consolidated invoicing across subscriptions, usage, and one-time charges; dunning and retry rules for failed recurring payments; a collections cadence someone owns; and automated matching of deposits to invoices.
Deferred revenue and recognition schedules that hold up as pricing gets more complex, clean journal entries into the ledger, segregation of duties across the cycle, and SOC 1 / SOC 2 readiness built into the workflow.
Scoped in three steps so you can stop after any one of them. Final pricing is quoted after the first call, based on channels, entities, and volume.
Map & Baseline
2–3 weeks
Fixed fee
Redesign & Implement
Project fee
Scoped from the diagnostic
Ongoing Oversight
Monthly
Retainer
No redesign until we know today's DSO, invoice cycle time, and where orders actually sit. A baseline is what turns "it feels faster" into a number you can show a lender or a board.
Automating a broken handoff just produces errors faster. We reengineer the steps first—then wire them together with APIs and webhooks so they stay fixed.
We work with what you already run—Shopify, Stripe, Amazon, TaxJar, QuickBooks Online, Xero, Wave, and your bank feeds. Fewer custom integrations to maintain, no rip-and-replace.
Every change lands as clean journal entries and reconciled accounts. Faster cash is worth less if the ledger behind it won't survive diligence.
Bring your last three months of orders, invoices, and receipts. In 20 minutes we can usually tell you which stage is costing you the most days—and whether it's a process problem or an integration one.