Here are five questions worth asking to address this challenge
Working capital is essential to a business and with finance leaders being tasked to do more with less, that lifeblood is increasingly at the core of the key decisions and strategic choices they need to make. These leaders have an array of working capital solutions at their disposal: supply chain finance, virtual cards, invoice platforms, forecasting tools and more options than ever before. However, more choices have led to less clarity.
All these choices have surfaced one theme that consistently comes up in conversations with treasury teams: organizations are optimizing individual pieces of working capital, but fewer feel confident they are managing it as a system. That fragmentation results in uncertainty that quickly becomes expensive. The overarching challenge is how to wield working capital as a strategic weapon rather than a tactical tool.
Here are five questions worth asking to address this challenge.
Question 1: Are we using working capital to grow or just to protect?
Working capital has traditionally been managed defensively. Preserve liquidity. Reduce risk. Maintain coverage. That approach still matters, but it is no longer enough.
The finance leaders pulling ahead ask a different question: not "do we have enough?" but "is our capital doing enough?"
That can mean paying suppliers earlier to secure better terms, moving quickly when opportunities appear or buying inventory ahead of a price increase. The shift is subtle but important. It moves working capital from a safeguard to a lever.
Question 2: Where are we relying on external financing unnecessarily?
When cash gets tied up in long payment cycles or sits in unpaid invoices, organizations often reach for external financing to fill the gap. Over time that may become standard practice.
It is worth asking how much of that financing is truly necessary. In certain cases the issue is not access to capital; it is how and when money moves through the business. Every day an invoice sits unpaid is a day you are probably financing a problem that a better process could prevent.
Question 3: Are we losing cash on a sale that we have already booked?
Some finance leaders do not ask this question because they assume a completed sale is secured revenue. However, between the invoice and the received payment, friction appears more often than expected.
In some cases, payments arrive with missing or incorrect references and the finance team cannot match them. The buyer's credit line does not refresh. Sales teams chase payments that have already been received but are not yet recognized. Meanwhile, the next order could be smaller, delayed or go elsewhere because of this potential process friction.
The question is not just whether customers are paying. It is whether internal processes allow those payments to translate into usable cash quickly.
Question 4: Are our controls helping the business move or holding it back?
Spend control often gets framed as a tradeoff: more control means less flexibility. In practice, that is not always true.
The instinct to restrict payment tools is often psychological rather than data-driven. In B2B contexts, the manual processes some finance teams rely on for fraud oversight tend to generate more administrative burden than the card programs they are designed to replace. The controls built into modern card programs are typically more sophisticated — and more auditable — than the manual approval workflows they succeed.
The more useful question is whether current controls reflect how the business actually operates, or whether they are solving for risks that no longer exist at the scale they once did.
Question 5: Are we managing payables and receivables as one system?
Most finance teams manage payables and receivables separately. Payables focus on extending terms. Receivables focus on accelerating collections; but these are two sides of the same cycle.
Here is a concrete example of why that matters:
A supplier extends a buyer a credit line with 60-day payment terms. If the buyer uses the full line in month one, purchasing stops until the invoice settles. That limits annual volume to six times the credit line. If that supplier accepts card payment and the buyer settles faster, the credit line refreshes monthly. The same line now supports twice the annual purchasing volume. Both sides benefit.
Commercial cards are one of the most underused tools for improving the cash cycle. They can extend days payable outstanding on the payables side while accelerating days sales outstanding on the receivables side, often with automated reconciliation and better data built in.
Start with the question, not the answer
Many finance leaders have plenty of solutions. The challenge is which to focus on.
The goal is not to answer every question at once. It is to find where the gap between what the organization knows and what it actually does is largest — and start there. If there is one place to start, it is commercial cards, for payables and receivables together. Most banking partners can move faster than finance teams expect.
About the author
Abhishek
Global Head of B2B Acceptance, Visa Commercial Solutions
Abhishek is leading all aspects of growing acceptance for Visa’s B2B commercial solutions. With over 15 years of experience in commercial payments, Abhishek has been instrumental in growing the network of B2B buyers and suppliers, launching innovative solutions, and developing enablement and analytical tools for financial institutions and corporates. As a go-to expert on commercial acceptance and B2B payments, Abhishek brings a wealth of experience across the entire payment ecosystem, working directly with corporates on receivables and payables, financial institutions, acquirers, and merchants.
- Visa. 2025. Working Capital In Flux: Visa’s 3rd Annual Working Capital Index.
- The Total Economic Impact™ of Commercial Credit Card Acceptance, a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Visa, March 2021, updated June 2024.