Category: Finance & KPIs

DSO benchmarks by industry for 2026, with a sourced table for 18 sectors. See if your days sales outstanding is your business model or trapped cash.

A EUR 40M manufacturer had a cash conversion cycle of 34 days two years ago. Today it is 51 days. DSO crept up 5 days. DIO crept up 8 days. DPO dropped 4 days. Each component moved within what the relevant team considered acceptable range. The combined shift locked up EUR 1.86M in working capital…

Profit margin dropped 3 points. Pricing held. Headcount is flat. COGS moved, but not enough to explain it. The P&L has no answer. This is the most common version of margin erosion. And the reason it takes so long to find is not that the data does not exist. It is that the data is…

Key Insight: Most companies have at least 3-7 percentage points of margin sitting in areas they never look at closely enough: unmanaged discounts, frozen inventory, and customers who cost more to service than they pay. Most companies track profitability at the company level. Revenue minus costs, done. The problem is that aggregate profitability hides where…

Key Insight: ABC analysis for inventory shows that roughly 20% of SKUs account for 80% of inventory value – but without adding the XYZ demand layer, you still don’t know which of those items are worth the cash they’re consuming. Most inventory problems look fine on a spreadsheet. Average days on hand, average turnover, average…

Key Insight: In most companies, 20-30% of SKUs haven’t moved meaningfully in 90+ days. That stock isn’t waiting to be sold. It’s an interest-free loan you made to yourself -capital that could be funding growth, sitting on a shelf instead. Your Warehouse Is Probably Your Largest Unmanaged Financial Position Companies spend months optimizing ad spend,…

Key Insight: A single average DSO number conceals the actual distribution of your receivables. In most companies, the top 20% of slow payers account for 60-70% of the total cash drag, and they never show up on the summary dashboard. Your finance dashboard says DSO is 45 days. Your CFO reviews it monthly. Nobody panics….

Days Payable Outstanding: Are You Paying Too Fast? A EUR 30M manufacturer with net-45 supplier terms and a DPO of 28 is paying 17 days early. Nobody decided to do that. It just happens. The math: annual COGS of EUR 22M divided by 365 equals EUR 60,274 per day. Multiply by 17 days paid early…

A 3-point gap between your net margin and your industry’s median doesn’t sound like much. On €25M revenue, it’s €750,000 per year. That’s not a rounding error. That’s a specific set of costs that other companies in your industry have figured out how to avoid. Net profit margin is the bottom line – literally. It…

Your current ratio is 2.1. Your quick ratio is 0.8. That gap, 1.3 points, is inventory. At a mid-size manufacturer, that could be €4.2M of stock your balance sheet calls a current asset. Your bank calls it collateral. Your cash flow calls it nothing, because it hasn’t moved in months. The quick ratio is the…