Payment and Deposit

Payment and deposit is the final event in the cash conversion period. This step involves looking at the way you receive payments from your customers, and continues through to the deposit of their payments into your business bank account. After the completion of this step, the cash paid to you is finally available for you to use.

"The check is in the mail." Your customers will likely rely on the postal service for sending you their payment. Typically, a customer waits until the payment due date before dropping the check in the mail. There is nothing wrong with waiting until the last day to send you the check, or for using the postal service. In fact, your customer is just taking advantage of a good cash flow management technique.

For your business, on the other hand, using the postal service to receive your customers' checks can add one to three days (possibly more) to your cash conversion period. Finding ways to bypass the postal service for receiving your customers' payments is a key factor in accelerating and improving your cash inflows in this step of the cash conversion period. There are a number of techniques you can use to accomplish just that:

• post office box
• lockbox banking
• preauthorized checks
• preauthorized debits