How order to cash breaks and how to fix it

Getting paid shouldn’t be this hard. But between order placement and cash in the bank, the O2C process has a way of quietly falling apart. Here’s how we approach accounts receivable and billing workflows at Tallyfy.

What O2C means and why it’s broken at most companies

The order to cash process covers everything that happens between a buyer placing an order and you getting the money. Sounds simple. It isn’t. If you run a retail shop, sure - someone hands you cash, you hand them a product. Done. But if you’re selling services, software, or anything B2B, the gap between “we got an order” and “we got paid” can stretch into weeks or months. And every day that gap exists, you’re losing money. O2C breaks down into order taking, credit checks, fulfillment, delivery verification, invoicing, payment collection, and reporting. That’s two distinct sub-processes stitched together: order management and bill-to-cash. The pattern we keep running into at Tallyfy - where financial services represents one of our largest industry segments - is that companies have all the pieces but no visibility into how they connect. Orders go in. Invoices go out. But the middle? That’s where things get weird. A BlackLine survey of over 1,300 finance leaders found that nearly 40% of CFOs don’t completely trust their own financial data. Worse, 68% said manual work leaves their organization vulnerable to errors that undermine business decisions. If you can’t trust the numbers coming out of your O2C process, you’re flying blind.

Real cost of slow cash

Here’s what nobody wants to talk about. Money sitting in unpaid invoices isn’t just “delayed revenue.” It’s money you could invest, grow, or use to avoid expensive credit lines.

Consider this: a company with $10M in annual credit sales and a 45-day DSO (days sales outstanding) has roughly $1.23M tied up in receivables at any given time. Cutting that to 35 days frees up $274K in working capital. That’s real money sitting in someone else’s pocket because your process is slow.

And if you’re using overdrafts to cover cash flow gaps while invoices sit unpaid? You’re paying interest on top of lost opportunity. That’s a double hit.

The expectation has shifted too. People expect speed now. Whether you’re a wholesaler or a SaaS provider, the buyers who pay your bills expect fast turnaround. A clunky O2C process doesn’t just cost you money - it makes you look disorganized. That affects whether people want to keep doing business with you.

This is exactly where workflow tracking helps. When every step of the process is visible, you spot delays before they become expensive. No more guessing where an order is stuck or why an invoice hasn’t gone out.

Where order management goes wrong

If your order management process has serious problems, you already know. Long lead times. Angry phone calls. Shipping errors that ripple into invoice disputes.

But the specific failure points are worth naming because they’re fixable:

• Orders get entered twice because systems don’t talk to each other
• Days pass between order placement and shipping for no clear reason
• Delivered goods don’t match what was invoiced
• Incorrect items ship because someone misread a handwritten order
• Sales reps turn away business or take back orders because inventory data is wrong

In discussions we’ve had with operations managers at mid-size companies, we hear the same story: “accountability was unclear - processes existed in people’s heads.” Nobody could see who was responsible for what, or where tasks were sitting.

The fix isn’t complicated. It’s just not sexy. You need to automate the handoffs and connect the information. When an order comes in, inventory should update. When goods ship, the invoice should generate. When payment arrives, it should reconcile. Each step triggers the next.

Best practices that I think matter most:

• Cut manual intervention wherever possible. Humans are great at judgment calls - terrible at data entry
• Let buyers place orders through digital systems instead of emails and phone calls
• Connect information across departments so workflows flow without someone manually carrying data from one system to another
• Kill unnecessary complexity. If a step doesn’t add value, remove it

The bill-to-cash mess

Getting an order out the door is only half the battle. Now you need to get paid. And this is where things get really messy.

I’ve seen companies where the invoicing process is so disconnected from order management that the finance team is basically reconstructing reality from scratch every billing cycle. That’s insane.

Common symptoms of a broken bill-to-cash process:

• A pile of one-off sales agreements with different discounts and payment terms that nobody can keep straight
• Reps making unauthorized promises to close deals
• Original quotes that don’t match final invoices
• Stacks of credit notes because invoices keep going out wrong
• Invoices that ship late or never get followed up
• Information gaps between sales, dispatch, and accounting

Invoicing errors cause payment disruptions for 45% of CFOs, and forecasting AR has become the number one headache in the process. That’s not a minor issue - it’s a systemic one.

The strategies for fixing this depend on your specific problems, but here’s what consistently works:

• Integrate buyer profiles into billing software so the correct payment terms apply automatically to every invoice
• Connect invoicing and payment data so debtor age analysis and follow-up happen in real time, not in monthly batch reviews
• Build structured workflows to follow up outstanding accounts instead of relying on someone remembering to send a reminder
• Give buyers an online platform to communicate with sales and accounting in a single thread from order placement through final payment

We’ve seen teams take processes with dozens of steps - processes where delayed tasks would slip through the cracks for weeks - and make them immediately visible. When a step stalls, someone knows about it the same day. Not next month when the aging report comes out.

Example Document

Sales Order Template

Standard template for documenting sales orders. Includes all required fields: customer info, products/services, quantities, pricing, payment terms, and delivery details. Use this format for consistency across all orders.

View template

Example Procedure

Client Invoice Processing & Billing Workflow

1Subcontractors: Perform their scope of work, paying for labor, equipment, material & any other costs

2Subcontractors: Bill the General Contractor for the total cost of doing their work

3General Contractor: Reviews subcontractors invoices

4General Contractor: Submit a bill to the Owner/Client

5General Contractor & Owner/Developer: Review the General Contractor invoice

+8 more steps

View template

Example Procedure

Account Reconciliation

1Compare internal cash register to bank statement

2Identify unmatched transactions between records

3Check for bank errors or recording mistakes

4Review and verify all matched transactions

5Complete reconciliation and document adjustments

View template

Why AI won’t save a broken O2C process

This is the part where I’m probably going to annoy some people. Everyone’s rushing to throw AI at their finance processes. Predictive payment scoring. Automated collections emails. Smart cash application.

And look - those tools can work. But only if the underlying process is sound.

One misconception we see constantly is that AI tools will compensate for weak process design. If your O2C process has unclear handoffs, duplicate data entry, and nobody tracking timelines, AI will just automate the chaos faster. You’ll get more invoices out quicker - but they’ll still be wrong. You’ll predict payment behavior more accurately - but you still won’t follow up on time because nobody owns that step.

Before you invest in AI-powered AR tools, ask yourself: can I draw my O2C process on a whiteboard right now? Can I tell you who’s responsible for each step? Can I show you where the bottlenecks are?

If the answer to any of those is no, you need process definition first. That’s the unsexy prerequisite. Map it. Track it. Measure it. Then automate it.

This is a core belief at Tallyfy - you need to know what your process looks like before you can improve it. We built the platform around this idea. Define the workflow, assign the steps, track the progress, and then layer in automation where it makes sense.

Making it work

Before you can fix your O2C process, you need to know where it’s breaking. That means measuring time at each step. Not “we think invoicing takes about a week” but actual data on how long each handoff takes.

Track these things:

• Time from order receipt to fulfillment start
• Time from shipment to invoice generation
• Time from invoice send to first payment reminder
• Time from payment receipt to reconciliation
• How many invoices require corrections or credit notes

Without this data, you’re guessing. And guessing is how companies end up with 60-day DSO when their terms say 30.

Using workflow software makes this measurement automatic. Tallyfy tracks every step, every handoff, every delay. The built-in analytics show you exactly where time is being lost so you can fix the right problems instead of the ones you assumed were problems.

The companies that get O2C right don’t do it by buying the fanciest tools. They do it by defining clear processes, making every step visible, and holding people accountable for their part. Everything else - the AI, the automation, the integrations - those are accelerants. They make a good process faster. They won’t make a bad process good.

Start by getting your process out of people’s heads and into a system where everyone can see it. That’s step one. The rest follows from there.