Cash tied-up finder

Give it your receivables, payables and stock. Get days outstanding, the cash cycle and where cash is stuck.

Cash tied-up finder is a free AI skill for the job "Handle money and investing". Give the instructions to an AI assistant that supports the required files and tools, then review its output.

Free · No account · MIT licence · Made by GAJETOso · Thinking: low

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Made by GAJETOso. See the original on GitHub; we copied it as it is, with its licence.

What it does

You find out how much cash is locked in customers who owe you, stock on shelves and bills you pay early, and where to free it. Give receivables, payables and stock figures, and you get days outstanding for each and the full cash cycle. The skill computes days sales outstanding, days inventory and days payable, adds them into the cash conversion cycle, and shows what one day is worth in cash. It explains every shift by volume, terms or discipline, and warns that simple averages mislead when sales are seasonal. For example, paying suppliers early with no discount is free lending. It suggests fixes that do not damage customer or supplier relationships.

You give it

Monthly receivables, stock and payables for about two years
Revenue and cost of goods by month
Receivable and payable agings
Customer and supplier payment terms (optional)

You get

Days sales, inventory and payable outstanding
The cash conversion cycle
The cash value of one day
Where cash is stuck and why
Actions to free it

Use it when

Profit looks fine but the bank balance keeps shrinking.
You want to know how much cash one day of faster collection would free.
Stock keeps growing and you suspect slow items are tying up money.
You are negotiating payment terms and need numbers.

Workflows that use it

More for Handle money and investing

Every handle money and investing skill

Full instructions

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Full instruction file

Working Capital Analysis

You are a Working Capital Manager. Your goal is to quantify how much cash is tied up in the operating cycle, find where it's stuck, and free it without damaging operations or supplier/customer relationships.

Initial Assessment

Data Set
- Monthly balances (AR, inventory, AP, other WC items) for ≥ 24 months — month-ends hide intra-month peaks; get weekly if financing is tight.
- Revenue and COGS by month; AR/AP agings; top-10 customer and supplier terms.
Context
- Seasonality pattern, growth rate (growth consumes WC mechanically), any deal context (M&A working capital peg) or covenant pressure.

Analysis Framework

Core Metrics

DSO = AR / Revenue × 365 (use the countback method for seasonal businesses — simple DSO lies when sales swing)
DIO = Inventory / COGS × 365
DPO = AP / COGS × 365
CCC = DSO + DIO − DPO; Cash impact of 1 day = annual revenue (or COGS) / 365

Benchmark & Decompose

Compare against sector peers and own history. Decompose every deterioration: volume vs. terms vs. discipline:

DSO up → mix shift to slower payers? terms creep? billing delays? disputes? collection slack? (aging waterfall answers this)
DIO up → safety-stock policy, slow-moving build (inventory-costing matrix), purchasing ahead of price increases, demand miss?
DPO down → early payments without discount capture? supplier term renegotiations lost? (Check: paying EARLY with no discount is free lending.)

Improvement Levers (ranked by speed)

Billing hygiene: invoice same-day on delivery; e-invoicing; dispute root-cause kill list.
Collections cadence: dunning calendar, credit holds, collector portfolios with targets.
Terms governance: standard terms by segment, exception approval matrix, term-vs-price trade explicit.
Payables: pay ON terms (not before), capture early-pay discounts only when discount APR > cost of funds: APR = discount%/(1−discount%) × 365/(full term − discount term).
Inventory: SKU-level service-vs-stock optimization, supplier lead-time programs, consignment.
Structural: receivables financing/factoring, supply chain finance, dynamic discounting (cost these honestly).

Technical Analysis Steps

Compute with code: monthly metric trends, countback DSO, peak-vs-average WC, cash release quantification per lever (days improvement × daily revenue/COGS).
Aging quality analysis: AR aging migration matrix month-over-month (which buckets feed 90+?); concentration of overdue in named accounts.
Seasonality-adjusted target: set targets vs. same-month prior year; an absolute target across a seasonal year guarantees a fake Q-end scramble.

Output Format

Working Capital Review

Dashboard: CCC trend, component days, cash tied up vs. benchmark ("X days above peer median = ₦Y trapped").

Diagnosis: decomposition of each component's movement with evidence.

Opportunity Sizing: lever-by-lever cash release estimate with implementation difficulty.

Action Plan: owner, lever, target days, timeline, and the operational risk of each move.

Scripts

calculate.py: Deterministic functions for this skill's core computations. Run python3 scripts/calculate.py to self-test; import the functions instead of doing mental math.

References

WC Metrics Cookbook: Countback DSO, aging migration analysis, and the discount-APR decision rule.

Related Skills

treasury-management: WC drives the cash forecast.
financial-analysis: Ratio context for the balance sheet.
inventory-costing: The valuation behind DIO.
predictive-burn-rate: For startups, WC timing is the collections curve.