Quote to cash
The whole process on one page, from the first order to getting paid.
Chan Consulting finds where your operation breaks, and what it's costing you.
Then does the work: automating the process, buying the right software, or building from scratch.
Overview
Not another assessment. A map, the cost, and the answer.
Cost of leaving it
- Waiting between steps
- 2.1 days avg
- Re-keyed by hand
- 31 hrs / week
- Quotes lost to slow reply
- 3.3x
What each problem costs you, in hours or dollars.
The answer
Waiting between steps
- automate the workthe answer
- buy the right software
- build from scratch
One thing to do about each problem: automate it, buy software, or build it.
Use cases
The same five places it always breaks.
Quoting
One quote, start to sent
Quotes take days to go out, and the slow ones lose.
The work inside a quote is usually minutes. The elapsed time is hours or days, and almost all of it is waiting: for a rate, for an approval, for someone to notice the request arrived. Speed is the finding, not the effort.
Re-keying
Order system
1,200
SO-4471 · confirmed
Accounting
1,020
keyed by hand · 2 min ago
does not matchThe same number gets typed into two systems.
Two systems that were never built to talk, with a person in between acting as the integration. It is slow, it is boring, and it is wrong often enough that nobody fully trusts either system. The reconciliation becomes its own job.
Chasing
Waiting on someone
- PO 4471 · supplier confirm6 days
- Invoice 22890 · approval4 days
- Customer 118 · missing doc2 days
Following up is somebody's whole week.
Nothing in the operation says what is late. A person holds it in their head, works a list, and sends the reminders. When that person is out, the whole thing stops moving and nobody finds out for days.
Approvals
Who owns this step
- SubmittedOps
- ApprovedUnassigned
- PaidFinance
Things sit, waiting on a signature.
The step that everything queues behind is usually the one with no named owner. This is the case that most often needs no software at all. Naming the owner and setting the rule fixes more of it than any tool would.
Reporting
This week's requests
- Margin by customer→ one person
- Last month, by lane→ one person
- Why is this number down→ one person
Every number has to go through one person.
The data is trapped in a system that will not give it up, so answering anything means an export and an afternoon. Leadership stops asking, which is worse than the delay, because the questions that stop getting asked are the expensive ones.
Implementation
From the first call to a fix.
Week one, what came back
- Pricing waits on a rate2.1 daysprocess
- Order keyed into two systems31 hrs / wkautomate
- Approval step has no ownerunownedprocess
1–The conversations
A few conversations, one person at a time, and each sketches their own part of the process. The parts fit together into one diagram of your whole operation. The diagram is yours to keep.
2–What comes back
Every break comes back with three things: the cause underneath the symptom, the cost in hours or dollars, and one answer, not a menu.
3–The work
Then the work starts on that one answer. Fixed scope, fixed price, both agreed before the first day.
Asked and answered before the call.
What kind of business is this built for?
Mid-market companies that run real operations — freight, distribution, manufacturing. Big enough to have serious volume, small enough that people are still doing a lot of it by hand.
What does this cost?
It depends on what the work turns out to be, and the first call settles that. Fixed scope and fixed price, agreed before anything starts. Never hourly.
Is any software resold here?
No. No commissions from any software company. The recommendation is yours, and you can take it to whoever builds it.
Bring one thing that is broken.
Fifteen minutes. If the answer is that you need no software, that is the answer.