Days Sales Outstanding Meaning, Formula, Calculate DSO

At Upflow for example, we automatically calculate your DSO using the countback method when connecting your account with your invoicing solution. You can then track your DSO from your private dashboard without having to think about calculating it yourself. The Integrated Receivables Cloud Platform from HighRadius is an industry-trusted credit and collections platform. Powered by AI, you can seamlessly reduce DSO with Collections automation. With the right tool, you can optimize the credit and collections process, thereby improving the DSO. Let’s say company A has a sales forecast of around $20,000 in 30 days, and DSO is 20.

• When the DSO is low for a business, it implies its good performance, while having a low A/R Turnover ratio indicates infrequent cash flow, which is not a good thing for any business from any sector/industry.
• DSO or Days Sales Outstanding is a KPI that reflects the time it takes for your invoices to be paid by customers.
• In short, the company can’t rely on the money they theoretically already have to pay for other things or to just use them in diverse operations.
• Days sales outstanding tends to increase as a company becomes less risk averse.
• The days sales outstanding calculation, also called the average collection period or days’ sales in receivables, measures the number of days it takes a company to collect cash from its credit sales.
• It could be a problem with customer satisfaction or possibly the result of giving longer payment times to improve sales.
• Knowing your DSO can also help determine whether or not to outsource collections or to simply improve your current processes and policies.

First, it gives investors and analysts a snapshot of a company’s liquidity and overall health. A high DSO can be a sign of financial distress and may suggest that the company is having difficulty paying its bills. Years of low interest rates and easy credit have allowed companies to take their eye off the ball when it comes to DSO management. If the company can easily borrow money at low interest rates, there is less need to worry about DSO increasing by a few extra days. Your billing process may be inadequate with invoices not being sent on time, errors that cause back and forth, and failure to submit late payment reminders.

Days Sales Outstanding definition

At some point managers need to understand the statements and how you affect the numbers. Learn more about financial ratios and how they help you understand financial statements. As you can see, it takes Devin approximately 31 days to collect cash from his customers on average.

• The shorter the DSO, the faster the company collects payment from its customers – and the sooner it is able to make use of its cash.
• Sales may be up for your business, but if you’re not collecting payment on those sales, your cash flow suffers, and could ultimately put you out of business.
• Some companies will use the average accounts receivable balance during the period, while others may use the closing accounts receivable balance.
• You’ll also have to notify your customers before and after you charge them.
• In general terms, a DSO of less than 45 is considered good, but this can vary between industries.
• If you don’t know how long it’s taking your customers to pay you, you won’t know that there’s a problem until you no longer have cash on hand.

In effect, determining the average length of time that a company’s outstanding balances are carried in receivables can reveal a great deal about the nature of the company’s cash flow. Days sales outstanding is the average number of days it takes a company to receive payment for a sale.

How to Calculate Days Sales Outstanding (DSO)

Given the vital importance of cash flow in running a business, it is in a company’s best interest to collect its outstanding accounts receivables as quickly as possible. Companies can expect with relative certainty that they will, in fact, be paid their outstanding receivables. But, because of the time value of money principle, time spent waiting to be paid is money lost. Days sales outstanding is a measure of the average number of days that it takes a company to collect payment for a sale.

However, you can avoid this and make your DSO better by offering discounts to customers who pay early. Your customers are the lifeline of your business, and to grow, you need to retain them. However, it’s crucial to understand whom you’re getting into business with; if a customer consistently delays payments, you must re-evaluate your strategy. Ensure your collections team is evaluating your customers’ creditworthiness. If you ask any CFO out there, they will tell you that cash flow is the heart of a business.

Days Sales Outstanding (DSO)

https://www.bookstime.com/ is the average number of days taken by a firm to collect payment from their customers after the completion of a sale. As a business owner, you can also view DSO as the number of days it takes for credit sales to be converted to cash, or the number of days that receivables remain outstanding until they’re collected. Day Sales Outstanding or DSO refers to the average number of days a business takes to collect its receivables after a sale. It is considered a popular metric by diverse industries to estimate their financial health. Usually, this is measured by calculating the number of days it takes to convert credit sales to cash. Let’s say the DSO of a business is 30 days, which means it has recovered its receivables or dues in 30 days.

So it’s important that the due diligence folks look at the aging of receivables—that is, how old specific invoices are and how many there are. It may be that a couple of unusually large, unusually late invoices are skewing the DSO number. As a Collections Manager you need to understand the Days Sales Outstanding metrics and use the analytics to make decisions. This table displays the receivables data used for each of the calculations. To gain a better insight, you should compare your company’s DSO against industry benchmarks, plus factor in economic fluctuations and your company’s capital structure and size.

Why is Tracking DSO Essential?

Longer DSOs mean that you spend money on activities or products and don’t get paid for a longer period. Reducing DSO is not completely within the control of your company’s finance and accounting departments. Therefore, reducing DSO requires not only a focused effort on the part of finance executives but the cooperation of various departments in the company as well. Below we outline six simple steps to begin reducing your company’s days sales outstanding in accounts receivable.

Automation-assisted collections solutions help collectors do their work more efficiently, leading to faster payments. AR automation can result in invoices that are sent and received more quickly, prompting quicker payment.

Offer incentives for early payments and penalties for late payments

This formula for calculating DSO is limited to credit sales, and cash sales transactions are usually kept out of it. All you have to do is divide your final accounts receivable by the total credit sales for the period (monthly/quarterly/annually) and multiply it by the number of days in the time period. Days sales outstanding is the average number of days that receivables remain outstanding before they are collected. It is used to determine the effectiveness of a company’s credit and collection efforts in allowing credit to customers, as well as its ability to collect from them. When measured at the individual customer level, it can indicate when a customer is having cash flow troubles, since the customer will attempt to stretch out the amount of time before it pays invoices. The measurement can be used internally to monitor the approximate amount of cash invested in receivables. In our hypothetical scenario, we have a company with revenues of $200mm in 2020.

DSO or Days Sales Outstanding is a KPI that reflects the time it takes for your invoices to be paid by customers. It’s counted in the number of days between the invoice being issued and the cash arriving in your company’s bank account. It’s can be a key factor in your company’s profitability in the long term. A lower DSO value indicates that it’s taken fewer days to collect payments for the sales you’ve made. If your DSO is too low, it indicates that your firm is too rigid with payment terms and policies, like penalizing your customer for delaying the payment by only one day. Policies like these would not give much time for customers to get their money together and pay you.

A sharp increase in DSO can cause a company serious cash flow problems. If a company’s ability to make its own payments in a timely fashion is disrupted, it may be forced to make drastic changes. Looking at a DSO value for a company for a single period can provide a good benchmark for quickly assessing a company’s cash flow. Low DSO will generally indicate that a company is receiving payment for credit sales quickly, which is generally positive. Finally, tracking your DSO over time allows you to view trends, be on the alert if the DSO rises, and make any adjustments to your accounts receivable process.

This is a situation where the company is unable to quickly collect on its sales. Accounting and finance executives can also use this data to make the case for reducing DSO to senior management and the various departments whose cooperation is necessary. This means that on average it took Example Enterprise 22 days to collect payment after a sale had been made. If you don’t know how long it’s taking your customers to pay you, you won’t know that there’s a problem until you no longer have cash on hand. The denominator is revenue per day, take the annual sales figure divided by the number of days in a year, or 360 to use round numbers. For example, if our company’s revenues were $7,200, we would divide that number by 360 to determine our company generated $20 in revenue per day. Because it can then put those funds back to work in the business sooner, a lower DSO is desirable.

Best Possible DSO

For clarity, your total credit sales represent the sum of sales over your chosen period and the accounts receivable is only measured on the last day of the period. In other words, the accounts receivable represents the money outstanding from the total credit sales at a particular moment in time. A high DSO number reveals that a company is taking longer than it should to collect accounts receivable from customers. The impact this can have on cash flow significantly affects smaller businesses who rely on the fast collection of payments to provide for operational expenses, like utilities and salaries. A low DSO number generally means that it takes the company less time to collect payments. Although it varies depending on the business type and structure, DSO numbers under 45 days are considered low. A low DSO value may also indicate that customers are paying on time or even early to benefit from discounts or the company has a very strict credit policy in place.

DSO helps businesses analyze how effective or efficient their processes are in collecting cash from customers who paid on credit. In other words, it takes this company’s customers an average of about 50 days to pay their bills. In this example you can see, how to calculate the average time from the invoice due date to the paid date, or the average days invoices are past due in days. You can compare the days’ sales outstanding with the company’s credit terms to understand how efficiently your company manages its receivables.

Using DSO to Improve Cash Flow Management

Avoid ambiguous terms such as “net-30” as it can confuse those who aren’t business-minded. Don’t worry, there’s a simple solution and it involves managing your Days Sales Outstanding DSO.

Supply chain finance enables suppliers to receive early payment on their invoices from a third-party funder. The cost of funding is based on the customer’s credit rating rather than the suppliers, typically resulting in a lower cost of funding. Companies sometimes improve DSO by offering their customers early payment discounts.