Unlocking Trapped Cash: Working Capital Optimization and SAP AR Acceleration with GetBilled®

Across industries with complex SAP Order to Invoice processes, 9–18% or more of revenue is trapped every month in unbilled accounts, delayed billing cycles, and invoice disputes. For a $5B enterprise, this means $450M–$900M locked away annually. Industry research confirms that more than half of global companies have seen their AR performance decline (per working capital reports  (The Hackett Group, PwC, and EY studies)), causing serious working capital erosion, raising the urgency of AR / billing optimization

The impact is clear:

• Strained working capital and reduced liquidity
• Rising Days Sales Outstanding (DSO)
• Lengthy Billing Cycle Times (BCT)
• Higher cost of capital
• Customer dissatisfaction and strained relationships

Unlocking Working Capital: CFOs consistently rank working capital improvement as a top priority. GetBilled directly improves liquidity by shortening billing cycles, lowering DSO, reducing unbilled revenue, and improving invoice quality. The result; freed cash flow, stronger balance sheets, and capacity for reinvestment without additional borrowing. Every 1% improvement in unbilled recovery can free millions in liquidity.

For Customers: Accelerated cash flow, measurable DSO reduction, reduced cycle times, improved invoice quality, fewer disputes, optimized working capital, and conversational AI-powered insights through natural language queries.

Problem Landscape & Value Thesis

CFOs face constant pressure to release trapped cash without increasing debt. Billing inefficiencies, not sales, are the hidden drain on liquidity. To strengthen balance sheets and fund growth, they always look for ways to cut DSO, improve cash flow, and free up working capital.

Industry Pain Points

• Unbilled Revenue: Unbilled Revenue: In complex order-to-invoice industries like oilfield services, energy, engineering & construction, industrial services, manufacturing, mining, and large field services, 9 to 18% or more of AR can remain unbilled, trapping billions in working capital.
• Billing Cycle Time (BCT): Fragmented handoffs, missing artifacts, errors in the document and manual approvals stretch cycle times by weeks. Each day of delay ties up millions in cash.
• Invoice Disputes: Defects and escapes lead to 5–15% or more dispute rates, increasing rework and slowing cash collection.
• High DSO: Public filings show DSO averaging 70+ days across Energy, Mining, Service, construction and Manufacturing sectors (or any other vertical where DSO is an issue)
• Financial Strain: For a $1B revenue firm, every day of DSO = ~$12M locked in receivables, eroding working capital and cost of capital for unbilled.
• Operational/Billing Concerns: Escalating billing costs and backlogs, poor cross-functional collaboration, increased operational costs and working capital leakage.

Why Standard SAP Falls Short

Standard SAP manages what to bill, not why it isn’t billed and remedy the delay.

SAP ECC and S/4HANA lack:

• Proactive tools to shorten billing cycle times
• Real time visibility into unbilled revenue and its impact on working capital
• Built-in analytics to quantify and link delay to financial impact
• Fragmented billing process for complex invoices
• Poor cross functional collaboration connecting all stake holders of order to invoice process – Operation, Billing, Finance and managers
• Centralized repositories for customer invoice requirements
• AI capability for unbilled real-time financial insights

Value Proposition 

GetBilled can transform SAP order to invoice process from a reactive into a proactive, governed, and cash optimized function.

GetBilled directly addresses these gaps:

• Unbilled Reduction: 10–25% or more cut, releasing trapped working capital
• BCT (Billing Cycle Time) Reduction: 15–30% or more faster cycles = earlier cash realization
• DSO Reduction: 1–5 or more days gained = tens or hundreds of millions unlocked
• Billing Standardization: Transforms into a unified, efficient process instrument with backlog reduction
• Collaboration: A single, integrated platform that unites all stakeholders across finance, operations, sales, and billing Unbilled into one governed process
• Cash Flow Improvement: More predictable inflows, lower borrowing needs
• Customer Satisfaction: Reduce dispute and improve first-pass invoice success

How It Works

• End-to-End Tracking & Visibility: Monitors every event in the order-to-invoice lifecycle — from job completion to RTA in real time. Gives billing and operations teams complete visibility into progress, bottlenecks, and delays.
• Real-Time Escalations & Proactive Billing: Detects issues early and escalates them instantly. Prevents backlog by flagging unbilled items and helping finance teams protect cash flow.
• Root Cause & Impact Analysis: Surfaces the who, what, and why behind billing delays, with quantified cost-to-company data to support finance and operations in driving process improvements.
• Workflow Automation & Standardization: Streamlines billing process to improve invoice quality and first-pass yield. Reduces manual effort for billing teams and drives consistency across business units with measurable standard KPI.
• Process & System Consolidation: Eliminates fragmented spreadsheets and manual processes by centralizing billing requirements, simplifying life for both operations and finance teams.
• AI-Powered Conversational Analytics: Lets teams ask natural language questions and get instant insights. Making complex data accessible to everyone from billing team to CFOs.
• Customizable KPI Executive Dashboards: Gives finance leaders real-time views of working capital locked, delay drivers, and unbilled KPI performance built using SAP BTP-based AI analytics and standards SAP reports
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Replaces scattered communication (emails, calls, shared folders) with structured, auditable collaboration across billing, operations, and finance.
• Seamless SAP Integration: SAP-certified plug-and-play deployment, native to ECC and S/4HANA with no middleware or changes to existing customer systems.
• Flexible Reporting Integration: Connects easily to enterprise reporting tools like SAP BW, Power BI, and others keeping all stakeholders in sync with their preferred platforms.
• Value Chain Alignment & Scalability: Integrates into the customer’s existing value chain, supports custom logic, and scales effortlessly across business units with no additional implementation costs.

KPIs & Outcomes

• BCT (Billing Cycle Time) trend: Shortened cycles = faster billing and cash inflows
• Unbilled %: Reduced backlog = less capital trapped
• DSO reduction: Direct measure of receivables efficiency
• First-pass yield: Higher approval rate = predictable cash flow
• Cash Flow Improvement: Reduced leakage, earlier inflows
• Custom KPIs defined by the customers, Opportunity to combine analytics from billed, unbilled, cash collected and disputed data very specific to the customer and provide complete end to end analytics to the customer
• AI Analytics: Conversational (international local languages) insights enable faster decision making and democratized analytics access. Can produce dynamic complex analytics with dashboards based on training the AI models

With GetBilled®: Unbilled revenue shrinks, BCT shortens, DSO improves, disputes drop, and cash flow strengthens.

Competitive Differentiation

Where others analyze working capital, GetBilled actually releases it and quantifies the impact.

• • Only SAP certified solution, addressing working capital, cycle time, and DSO directly
  • First and only SAP Order to Invoice solution with MCP-powered conversational AI
  • ROI > 300% in Year 1, driven by working capital release and cash flow gains and compounding gains year over year
  • Fostered long-term CFO involvement by regularly reporting cycle time and DSO progress, leveraging technology and process upgrades for business units at both national and international levels.

• Enterprise-grade compliance and security, aligned with SAP best practices and framework

Target Customers (Industry-agnostic)

• SAP ECC/S4 enterprises with ideally with revenue >$1B, unbilled >5%, DSO >50 days 
• Sectors characterized by elevated working capital trapped in accounts receivable, marked by substantial unbilled amounts and a high ratio of disputed invoices

Buyer Personas & Messaging

• CFO: Unlock working capital, shorten cycle times, accelerate cash flow. 
• Billing VP: Reduces billing backlog, disputes and deliver faster billing. 
• CIO: Certified add-on with minimal disruption and fast ROI. 
• IT: SAP Certified Plug and Play