Revenue is not cash

Revenue is not cash. People mix these up in commercial planning meetings every day, and the confusion explains a lot of what goes wrong in B2B businesses that look successful on paper.

Revenue is what you book when you deliver. Cash is what arrives when the customer pays. In B2B with public-sector buyers, channel partners, or enterprise contracts, the gap between those two moments is 60 to 120 days. Sometimes longer.

That gap has a name on the balance sheet. Accounts receivable. On the Deloitte EVM, it sits inside Asset Efficiency. A lot of commercial leaders never look at that box.

Three things break when a sales org chases revenue without watching cash.

First, you can have a record quarter and an empty bank account at the same time. Bookings up, collections down, no working capital to fund next quarter's pipeline.

Second, comp plans reward behavior that kills cash. Reps push deals with extended payment terms because the booking credit lands fast. The CFO inherits the receivables problem six months later.

Third, the forecast disconnects from reality. Leadership plans on revenue. Treasury runs out of cash before the planned hires arrive. The business gets shaky in the design, and no one made a bad call.

The fix is uncomfortable, not complicated. Track DSO by segment and by channel. Tie part of commercial comp to collected revenue, not just booked. Forecast cash conversion alongside bookings every quarter. Put receivables aging on the commercial leadership agenda, not just a finance report.

A lot of commercial teams push back on this because cash is "not their job." That's the gap between an order-taker culture and an operator culture. The order-taker hits the booking. The operator hits the cash.

The scoreboard doesn't care. The bank account does.