Scary Cash Stories: Tales from the Finance Crypt
Some say you can still hear the echoes of unpaid invoices… drifting through quarter-end close.
October is for ghost stories, and few things haunt a CFO like cash that should be in the bank but isn’t. Below are quick, true-to-life vignettes pulled from recent headstones, eh, headlines, as well as industry data, followed by the silver bullets that keep these monsters at bay. Ready? Let’s go trick-or-treating!
1) The Vendor Vanishing (a.k.a. “Shipments? What shipments?”)
When a retailer falls behind on payables, suppliers can vanish overnight. During Bed Bath & Beyond’s collapse, several vendors halted shipments amid unpaid bills — a classic death spiral where inventory dries up, sales fall, and cash evaporates. Bloomberg
The lesson: When your outflows slip, your inflows soon follow. Vendor trust is a cash multiplier.
2) The Clawback Curse
Bankruptcies come with a nasty epilogue: preference actions. Rite Aid’s saga included attempts to unwind tens of millions in payments to key suppliers, a reminder that chaotic cash management can haunt counterparties long after an invoice “gets paid.” Bloomberg Law
The lesson: Poor controls don’t just spook auditors… they can bite trading partners when they “rise from the dead”, too.
3) The Phantom Invoices
Nothing chills the spine like finding your receivables pledged… twice. First Brands’ 2025 bankruptcy probe flagged potential irregularities in customer-invoice factoring and a multi-billion-dollar shortfall tied to receivables structures. If cash is king, dirty data is the usurper. Reuters
The lesson: If your AR isn’t trustworthy, neither are your liquidity levers.
4) The 90-Day Night
Across markets, late payments linger. Global studies pegged average DSO near two months+ in 2024, and 2025 North America surveys still show a heavy share of B2B invoices overdue. You can feel fine… right up until the month you don’t. CFO Dive
The lesson: “It’s just a few days late” is how every good horror film starts.
How to Survive the Night: A Cash Control Playbook
Unify Cash Data Across Systems
Cash flow problems are often data problems. Pull invoices, emails, POs, remittances, and portal status into one living graph so your team is working from truth, not tab-ridden spreadsheets.
Put Collections Campaigns on Autopilot
Replace “remember to follow up” with always-on, programmable workflows that segment customers, pre-empt due dates, route disputes, and continually surface the next best action — every day, automatically.
Automate the Portals
Supplier portals like Coupa and Ariba haunt every AR team. Use an agent to detect customers requiring portal submission, submit invoices directly to the portal, and monitor invoice status — keeping inflow visibility clear and confidence high.
Connect Collections and Forecasting
Every promise-to-pay, partial remit, dispute, and fee should feed a driver-based AR forecast that updates in real time. When your inflow data learns and adapts, your forecasts stop being scary surprises.
Apply Cash Intelligently
Matching payments shouldn’t feel like ghost hunting. Use an agent to automatically match remittances, lockbox files, and payments to open invoices — boosting match rates, improving accuracy, and freeing your team from reconciliation purgatory.
Make it Auditable
Automated actions should leave receipts (literally): who/what/when/why, tied back to your ERP/CRM. AI should follow the same rules — transparent, traceable, and always accountable.
This is exactly the philosophy behind Tesorio’s Connected Financial Operations Platform: unify data, govern automated workflows, and manage cash by exception — so you turn revenue into cash faster and keep your customer experience intact.
When your data is connected, your cash flow doesn’t have to be haunted.
Ready to put the monsters back in the box? Let’s exorcise your aging report. Demo Tesorio.