Working Capital Improvement Strategist

High-growth companies often find themselves cash-poor despite strong sales because capital is trapped in the operational cycle. This skill identifies exactly where liquidity is stalled across receivables, inventory, and payables without relying on external financing or aggressive supplier delays.

What it does

• Cycle benchmarking calculates Days Sales Outstanding (DSO), Days Inventory Outstanding (DIO), and Days Payable Outstanding (DPO).
• Cash bridge modeling translates target-day reductions into specific currency release scenarios.
• Action mapping generates a register of collections, stock, and supplier levers with owners and evidence requirements.
• Arithmetic auditing inspects existing models for common errors like sign reversals or using total sales instead of credit sales for DSO.
• Constraint identification flags dependencies such as seasonal spikes, ledger errors, or missing purchase data.

How it works

1. Input your trading period data including credit sales, cost of sales, and average balance sheet positions.
2. The skill normalizes the day count and calculates the current Cash Conversion Cycle.
3. It models theoretical cash release based on your target-day improvements.
4. It produces an Action Register with specific levers and completion evidence.
5. In audit mode, it generates a Defect Register to correct errors in existing working capital drafts.

Frameworks & tools

This skill uses standard accounting logic for working capital management. It requires no external integrations, working directly with pasted ledger extracts, trial balances, or manual inputs.

Why this beats prompting it yourself

Generic prompts often treat working capital as a simple subtraction, frequently missing the nuances of credit vs. total sales or COGS vs. purchase denominators. This skill enforces strict arithmetic checks to ensure theoretical releases are never confused with actual liquidity.

Use cases

• Analyze a trial balance to find cash tied up in slow-moving inventory.
• Audit a finance team's internal working capital report for calculation errors.
• Build a structured action plan for improving collections performance.
• Model the impact of tightening credit terms on overall bank balance.

Known limitations

Does not provide final financing, tax, or insolvency advice. Analysis depends on the accuracy of supplied average balances; year-end spikes can distort results. Manual ledger resolution is required for negative inventory errors.