Order-to-cash is the process that turns work you have already done into money in the bank. An invoice goes out, a payment comes in, the books get reconciled, and the cash position updates. On a slide it is four clean boxes. In reality it is a relay race run across half a dozen systems that were never designed to talk to each other — and margin leaks at every handoff.
The leaks are rarely dramatic. No single one shows up as a line item a CFO would notice. They are fractions of a percent, scattered across thousands of transactions, hidden in the seams between a billing system, a bank, a processor, and a general ledger. Added up, they are routinely worth 10–15% of revenue in recovered EBITDA. The problem is that no one system can see the whole flow, so no one owns the leak.