Order-to-cash at a growing distributor: one workflow, one ledger, one view

• Orders are captured in several places and lost or delayed between handoffs.
• No credit check step precedes dispatch; collections disputes are routine.
• Finance reconciles three parallel records of the same transactions at month end.
• Management has no real-time view of what is sold, delivered, outstanding or collected.
• Key staff hold the institutional knowledge of how things actually get done.

• Order-to-cash discovery: the full path from a call from a customer to cash in the bank, as it actually happens.
• Interviews across sales, dispatch, credit and finance; workflow analysis of each handoff.
• Systems and tools audit, including the spreadsheets that currently carry the ledger.
• Control-gap analysis on credit, dispatch authorization and reconciliation.
• Bottleneck identification: where work waits, and on what.

• A single order-to-cash workflow with defined stages, owners and completion criteria.
• Credit-limit control designed as a process step before dispatch — not a feature.
• A delivery-confirmation step that closes the loop between dispatch and collections.
• A monthly close process: what is reconciled, against what, by whom, by when.
• Role and responsibility clarity for sales, credit and finance, with documented SOPs.

• A lightweight workflow system configured to the redesigned process, with mobile order capture.
• Integration with banking and payment rails for visibility of collections.
• A management dashboard: orders, deliveries, outstanding, collections, cycle time.
• Training for the commercial and finance teams, with change support.

• Weekly operational reviews against cycle-time and collection metrics.
• Process-owner model: named owners for each stage of order-to-cash.
• Automating the stable, repetitive reconciliation steps — once the process is stable.
• Quarterly review of credit limits and dispatch controls.

This framework demonstrates the structure of the engagement: the three parallel records become one, credit decisions happen before dispatch instead of after collections, and management sees the business as it is happening. Measured results depend on the baseline set during the diagnostic — and are reported where the client permits.

• —Automating a broken process scales the confusion. Redesign first.
• —Credit control is a process-design problem before it is a software feature.
• —Growth does not fix processes; it exposes them.