Insights

Shrink Your Cash-To-Cash Cycle

By moving excess active inventory listings out of spreadsheets and into a central online location, you’ll successfully transform surplus sales from an end‐of‐quarter fire drill into a metrics‐driven continuous improvement cycle.

With consumer returns, there is a specific cash-to-cash cycle that marks the time between when your company issues a credit on a customer return to when the cash ends up in your bank - a cycle that can take anywhere from 10 weeks to 6 months to complete.

However, there is a way to escape this cash flow quagmire. The trick is to collapse the process steps under a single vendor, thus reducing cycle times by sidestepping the receipt of returns altogether and having a remarketing partner receive, sort, disposition and remarket them for you.

For many companies, resistance comes from sales organizations and their concerns with channel conflict, grey market activity and sales cannibalization.

They prefer a manual approach to addressing slow‐moving inventory ‐ using spreadsheets and email. Even though sales time is wasted with double-booking and exception-pricing approvals, at the end of the quarter the excess inventory picture is seldom dramatically different from the beginning.

This is where alternative channels provider FreeFlow can deliver solutions, through its secondary market auction platform. With pre‐approved discount levels rejected, approved offers will reduce inventory in real time and you can avoid double‐booking. Meanwhile, unsold inventory can be rolled over to your external, market-facing liquidation site at the click of a button.

An added benefit is accountability. Your company will now have an audit trail of which inventory is moving, who is moving it (and who isn’t), and what products sell at the highest and lowest margins.

Most importantly, there is no issue of channel conflict because you’re selling to your channel. Your sales team has real‐time, 24x7 visibility to inventory quantities available for discounted channel partner sales. 

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