Quote-to-cash

What is quote-to-cash?

Quote-to-cash is the full process from building a quote through contract, order, invoice and collecting payment. Stripe's guide lists the stages as product configuration, pricing, quoting, contract creation and negotiation, order management, invoicing, payment collection and revenue recognition. It crosses sales, operations and finance, which is why problems in it tend to fall between teams. Lead-to-cash is the wider version that starts at the first lead.

Why it matters to a revenue leader

A signed deal is worth little until it is invoiced and paid. Slow quotes lose jobs, pricing errors erode margin, and gaps between what sales sold and what operations delivered turn into disputed invoices and rising days sales outstanding. In commercial services, the chain runs from a quote or deficiency proposal to a work order, a completed job, an invoice and payment, and a delay at any link pushes revenue and cash into a later month. For a PE-backed company, quote-to-cash speed shows up directly in working capital.

A fire and life safety company gets $600,000 of repair quotes approved in a quarter, spread evenly across its 90 days. Jobs take an average of 25 days to schedule after approval and invoices go out 12 days after completion, so much of the late-quarter work is completed and billed in the next quarter. Cutting scheduling time to 10 days moves about $100,000 of work, 15 days of approvals, into the quarter it was sold.