08/18/2026
Your DSO is not an accounting metric. It's a dollar amount sitting in someone else's bank account.
Here's the math, and it's simple enough to do on your phone.
Cash tied up in receivables = your DSO Ă— (annual revenue Ă· 365).
Run a $5M business? Every 10 days of DSO is $137,000 of your money out on the street. Here's what that looks like across a realistic range:
• 30 days — $411,000 tied up • 45 days — $616,000 • 60 days — $822,000 • 75 days — $1,027,000 • 90 days — $1,233,000
Cut from 75 days to 45 and you free up $411,000 in cash. Not new revenue — cash you already earned, just sitting somewhere it shouldn't be. Permanently freed, not a one-time bump.
And that's before the second cost. Money you don't have is money you can't deploy. It's the crew you didn't hire, the equipment you financed instead of bought, the job you passed on because you couldn't float materials. Nobody puts that on a P&L, but every owner has felt it.
Then the third cost, which is the brutal one: the longer an account sits, the less of it you ever collect. Slow doesn't just mean late. Slow means less.
Most companies have never run this number. Run yours. If it's bigger than you expected, that's a solvable problem — and solving it permanently is a different conversation than placing a few accounts.
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