A chief financial officer can only optimize the cash they can see.

An invoice arriving outside an integrated B2B environment gives finance less time and potentially less information to decide how the resulting obligation should be managed. Until recently, the inconvenience of missing or incomplete information was relatively avoidable.

But in today’s real-time, always-on, 24/7 commerce landscape, working capital optimization depends on timing. This is not your grandfather’s net 30 and net 60 timing either. It’s microseconds, milliseconds and entirely new units of money movement.

Consider two companies buying the same $100,000 of goods under identical supplier terms. At the first company, the supplier is connected to the buyer’s purchasing and payment infrastructure. The company can potentially see the obligation when the purchase is initiated, match the invoice against the order, route approval automatically, and determine how and when the supplier should be paid.

At the second company, the invoice enters through a disconnected workflow and must be reconciled manually.

Both companies technically have the same payment terms. Economically, however, they do not necessarily have the same flexibility. That distinction is helping define a broader definition of working capital infrastructure where supplier integration is not just an accounts payable efficiency exercise. It can determine how early a company acquires usable information about future cash movements.

Purchase orders, invoices, approvals and payments can exist across separate systems and workflows. The closer a transaction gets to its due date before finance has complete information, the narrower its range of working capital choices becomes.

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