Cutting the cash float 90%

The problem

The company paid its supplier for a customer's product almost immediately, but customers paid three to four business days later. On about 70% of revenue, it was fronting the supplier's cash. Covering that took a line of credit from the supplier itself, capped at $200,000, and the supplier refused to raise it. As volume grew, the float climbed toward $1M and the credit limit became a ceiling on growth.

The root cause

Supplier payments weren't linked to customer billing. Nothing tied what a customer was billed to what the supplier was paid for the same order, so the company fronted 100% of product cost and reconciled by hand afterward. It already had API access to the supplier's invoices and had its own customer invoices. The data to link them existed. It just wasn't connected.

What we did

A completed delivery now split the payment automatically. The platform took each customer's payment, sent the product portion straight to the supplier's bank account matched to its invoice, and kept only the company's share, about 8% (delivery fees, alcohol, tax-exempt items). The last customers paying by check moved to card and ACH.

The supplier got a self-service portal showing each payout against the exact invoices it covered, to the cent, so it could check at any time that it had been paid in full, and move the staff who had matched wires by hand. A monthly reconciliation investigated every mismatch and automated it away.