Sales team hit 112% of target. Same financial year, the founder is struggling to find working capital to pay salaries.
order booking
collections
Incentives went out on time. The receivables did not come in on time.
The founder asked how to get this sorted. The answer took twenty minutes — because the problem was never a collections process. It was a measurement design.
Diagnose who gets paid for what
Start with one question: who in the company is measured on collection?
The Sales Executive is measured on order booking. Finance reports on collection — reports, not owns. Nobody's compensation, review, or achievement percentage moves based on whether the cash actually arrives.
So when the customer asks for 90 days instead of 45, the Executive says yes
It costs him nothing. It closes the purchase order this month. His achievement percentage moves today. The cash arrives two quarters later, and by then it is somebody else's problem — Finance's, the founder's, whoever is trying to make payroll that month.
That is not a sales integrity issue. Nobody did anything dishonest. It is exactly what the system was designed to reward — closed orders, on any credit terms, as fast as possible. The Executive followed the incentive precisely. The incentive was built wrong.
How to check whether this is happening in your company
Pull last year's closed orders into four columns: order value, credit period agreed, actual days to collect, and the Sales Executive's name.
The Three-Step Check
Sort by credit period, highest first
The orders with the longest payment terms rise to the top of the list, regardless of value or executive.
See whether the same two or three names sit at the top
If long-credit deals are spread evenly across the team, this is a customer-negotiation issue, not a design issue. If two or three names dominate that list, it is structural.
Compare their achievement percentage against DSO for those accounts
This is the number that settles it. A high achiever with a high days-sales-outstanding on their own accounts is not a strong performer by any honest measure — they are a strong negotiator against your own balance sheet.
If your top achievers are also your longest payers, they are not outselling the team. They are outspending the company on working capital, and being paid a bonus for it.
Order booking and collections are different numbers
Order booking is a sales number. Collections is a commercial number. Most founder-led companies run the entire business on the first one, because it is the number that shows up in every sales review, every incentive calculation, every board update.
You did not have a record sales year. You funded your customers' working capital
The fix is not a stricter collections team or harder follow-up calls on overdue invoices. Those treat the symptom. The fix is putting collection into the same measurement system that already governs order booking — a credit-period ceiling the Executive cannot exceed without approval, or an achievement calculation that weights cash collected as heavily as orders signed. Whichever mechanism you choose, the principle is the same: measure the behaviour you actually want, not just the one that is easiest to report.