Baseline
Receivables are the part everyone counts. This is the rest of it.
Cash sitting in the pool
$2,589,041
- Raw material$707,42612.30 days27.3%
- Work in process$790,46113.74 days30.5%
- Finished goods$695,20312.08 days26.9%
- Retainage held back$395,9516.88 days15.3%
Each day count is rounded on its own and the total is the rounded true total, so the parts may not add to the last digit.
The last bucket is the one with a contract behind it. That money is earned — the work is done and accepted — and it is held back by agreement until a condition is met. It is not late, and nobody is chasing it, which is exactly why it sits.
Here it is by how long it has been held, at 31 Dec 2025.
- Held 90 days or less$150,85138%
- 91 to 180 days$84,08421%
- 181 to 270 daysaged$89,41023%
- Over 270 daysaged$71,60618%
One thing this example cannot show you, said plainly: the same picture for work in process needs a record per item, and this company's books hold a monthly balance and nothing else. That is the ordinary case, and it is the point of the beat below — the measure is the thing you install first, because until you do there is nothing to read.
Where it leaks
Every bucket has a day count. One of them is quoted against the wrong denominator, and it is ours to say so.
Inventory is carried at cost, so the denominator is cost of sales. That is what makes the four buckets comparable with each other.
on a cost denominator
This is the figure the stack has to use, and read on its own it overstates. Retainage is billed at your selling price, not at what the work cost you — so putting it over a cost denominator divides a bigger number by a smaller one.
on a revenue denominator
Same dollars, honest clock. This is the number to quote when retainage is discussed on its own.
Computed from this company's own margin rather than quoted from anywhere. At a different margin it is a different factor, which is why it is worked out in front of you. Each figure above is rounded on its own, so multiplying the two as printed lands a hundredth off the first one; both come from the unrounded amounts.
Of the retainage outstanding, 25.5% has a release date written down somewhere a person will see it. The rest — $294,885 — is owed under conditions that exist in the contract and on nobody's calendar.
That balance is not overdue. It is unwatched, which is worse, because overdue money is at least on a list.
Each amount there is rounded to the dollar on its own, so the two parts can land a dollar off the balance they came from. Neither was adjusted to close it.
Nothing is released today. The balance moves from work you've done to work you've billed — and the cash shows up about one payment cycle later. We say that before the change, not after it.
This assumes your terms start at the invoice. If they start at the ship date, your clock was already running and the picture is different — that's the first thing we'd check on your side.
If you borrow against your receivables, there is one thing that can move today: billed invoices count toward what you can draw and unbilled work usually doesn't. Reading that against your own facility is separate work, and we'd say so before doing it.
The fix
Before automating anything, make it visible. This one is mostly a calendar.
Release dates live on a schedule, not in a filing cabinet.
What the balances with no date on them actually took. The two populations differ in one way: whether anybody wrote the date down.
What that looks like on a Monday morning
The next 6 conditions falling due, off the contracts you already signed. No model, no prediction — a list with dates on it.
- Talon EnclosuresRET-0063$4,9954 Jan 2026in 4 days
- Ironwood AssembliesRET-0049$4,0876 Jan 2026in 6 days
- Copperfield ValveRET-0058$5,69219 Jan 2026in 19 days
- Whitecap TrailersRET-0076$12,1616 Feb 2026in 37 days
- Larkspur InstrumentsRET-0070$2,58121 Feb 2026in 52 days
- Delta CoatingsRET-0067$11,60618 Mar 2026in 77 days
Holding it
How you would know it stayed fixed.
103–180 days held
Limits from 12 periods. Beneath: how much it moved from one period to the next.
Before automating anything, make it visible — some of this is a calendar, not a robot.
This is the dollar-weighted age of what is still being held — not of what came in, which would move with whichever balances happened to close that month. The months carry between 32 and 48 balances, which is close enough for one month's age to mean the same thing as the next one's.
One month is flagged: Jun 2025, at 110.27 days, sits below the lower limit. On an age that is the direction you want — the book got younger than its own history — and it is still worth an hour of somebody's time, because a process that improves for a reason nobody identified will go back for the same reason.
There is no second line, because there is no "after" yet. The month the schedule goes live is where the band gets recomputed, and until the new run is long enough to set its own it gets measured against this one.
44.2–46.2 days
Run chart — no control limits. This measure is a ratio of a rolling year, so its points are not independent.
The headline ratio belongs on the wall too, and it belongs there without limits. Each point is a balance over a rolling year of cost, so consecutive months share almost all of their denominator and cannot be treated as independent readings. Drawing limits on it would manufacture signals out of the overlap. Watch the direction, not the wobble.