The role of the finance function is being re-written as companies increasingly are no longer satisfied with observing cash flow in the rearview mirror. Instead, they are beginning to redesign it.
The latest data in the report “Time to Cash™: A New Measure of Business Resilience,” a new PYMNTS Intelligence collaboration with Bottomline and FIS, revealed that Time to Cash™, the speed at which a company turns sales into usable capital, now correlates more strongly with performance than sector, size, or even revenue growth.
The report classified companies into three distinct profiles: Strategic Movers, Stable Operators, and Liquidity Constrained. Each are mapped to the maturity of their cash velocity systems. Strategic Movers represent the top tier: companies that treat liquidity speed as a strategic lever, not a finance metric. These firms reported strong business performance at nearly triple the rate of the Liquidity Constrained cohort, suggesting that Time to Cash™ has become a proxy for overall organizational effectiveness.
Faster cycles translated into higher liquidity, sharper forecasting, more reliable supplier management, and the ability to reinvest with confidence. All traits associated with resilient enterprises.
And the report found that firms with shorter Time to Cash™ don’t just perform better. They even think differently.
Receivables Are First Mile and Strongest Lever of Cash Acceleration
The first, and perhaps most overlooked, starting point is visibility. Many companies cannot explain, with precision, where cash slows down. Finance teams often track dozens of metrics but still lack a single end-to-end view of value creation to monetization. As a result, they diagnose problems too late. A quarter ends, numbers are tallied, and the realization emerges that liquidity slipped because of a spike in invoice disputes or a slowdown in order processing or a change in customer payment behavior.
By the time the symptoms appear, the underlying friction has already materialized.
And perhaps the most surprising takeaway from the report is just how central receivables automation has become to the entire velocity equation. While much attention is typically given to payables optimization, working capital financing, or capital allocation strategies, the report makes it clear that the single greatest determinant of cash speed lies at the front end of the cycle: how quickly a company turns sales into posted cash.
Companies closing the visibility, and Time to Cash, gap are doing so by re-plumbing the data architecture around cash.
Enterprises have automated, on average, 55% of their accounts receivable processes. But the spread between leaders and laggards is stark. Strategic Movers automate 27% more of their AR workflows than Liquidity Constrained firms. Companies using agentic artificial intelligence (AI) tools report average automation levels reaching 95%, while those without AI hover around 38%.
Yet despite its strategic value, receivables automation remains a work in progress for much of the market. Sixty-eight percent of CFOs cite customer or vendor adoption barriers, and 65% identify integration complexity as a hurdle. These findings underscore a fundamental challenge: receivables performance depends not only on internal systems but on the broader ecosystem of customers, suppliers, and platforms.
The companies that break through these barriers are rewarded disproportionately. The report showed that faster posting, near-real-time reconciliation, and AI-enhanced cash application dramatically shorten the cash conversion window. As enterprises adopt AI-driven AR tools, the traditional drag created by exceptions, disputes and manual reconciliation diminishes.
Threaded across these three takeaways is a broader thesis: Time to Cash™ is no longer simply a financial metric. It is an operational philosophy that binds together forecasting, automation, AI, customer behavior and internal process design. Companies that understand this are not just accelerating cash — they are redesigning how they operate.
Source: https://www.pymnts.com/