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November 2, 2026You booked the sale, sent the invoice, and the revenue shows on your profit and loss statement. But the bank balance does not move until the customer pays. The gap between those two events is where many profitable companies run short of cash.
I began my career in equity research at ISI Group in New York. Whatever the business, cash is the number to check first.
Why 60 days is the line to watch
An invoice that is a few weeks old is normal business. An invoice past 60 days is a signal. Something is stuck: a dispute, missing paperwork, a slow approver, or a customer who will not pay. Every day it ages, it gets harder to collect, and it is still counted as revenue you “have.”
The 4-bucket test
Pull your receivables aging report and sort every invoice past 60 days into one of four buckets:
- Slow but solid. A good customer with a known payment date. Cash is coming.
- Stuck on paperwork. A missing purchase order, approval, or backup document. This is internal, and usually fixable this week.
- Disputed. The customer disagrees with the work or the amount. Needs a named owner and a decision date.
- Doubtful. No response, no payment plan, no date. Treat it as unlikely to be collected.
What to do with the answer
Earned cash is the cash you have collected, plus the receivables in bucket one that you can date. Buckets two and three are work to finish, not cash to plan around. Bucket four belongs outside your forecast.
Then ask three questions each month: Who owns each stuck invoice? What is the next step and its date? Does our cash forecast count only what we can actually date?
The point
Profit tells you the business is working. Cash tells you whether you can pay people, invest, and sleep. Aged receivables are where the two come apart, and a clear, plain-English view of them is part of running finance as one system that turns revenue into profit, cash and business value.
That is what we build at Veritas: a finance team that makes your numbers easy to navigate. Start here:
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