POWER OF PM HUB x EZIDEBIT
How much of your firm's cash is locked up right now?
Lock-up is the number of days between doing the work and having the money. Most partners can quote their fee growth to one decimal place and have never calculated this. Four numbers, and you'll have it.
Everything is calculated in your browser. Nothing is sent anywhere unless you choose to request the written breakdown at the bottom.
How much of your firm's cash is locked up right now?
Lock-up is two separate problems added together, and they have different causes and different fixes. Splitting them is the whole point of the exercise a firm with 40 WIP days and 30 debtor days has a billing discipline problem, while a firm with 15 WIP days and 55 debtor days has a collections problem. They look identical on the lock-up line and need completely different interventions.
If your WIP days are the bigger half
The delay is between finishing work and raising the invoice, and it is almost always one of three things: time entered late, narrative missing so the invoice can't be drafted, or invoices sitting in a partner's review queue. All three are visibility problems before they're discipline problems - nobody chases what they can't see on a list.
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Pull an aged WIP report by client and by responsible partner. The distribution matters more than the total: high lock-up is usually a small number of very old jobs, not an even spread.
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Anything older than 90 days is at serious risk of being written off rather than billed. Price that in as a loss, not as an asset.
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Set a billing rhythm rather than a billing event. Work billed weekly ages half as much as work billed monthly, for the same effort.
If your debtor days are the bigger half
The delay is after the invoice has gone out, and the usual cause is that your collection process depends on a person remembering. Inconsistent chasing teaches clients that your invoices can wait which is a pricing signal, whether you meant to send it or not.
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Check whether your reminders actually go out on a schedule, or only when someone notices. If it's the latter, that's the single highest-return fix available to you.
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Look at what proportion of clients are on direct debit or autopay. For recurring compliance work there is rarely a good reason for that number to be low.
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If you bill across related entities, check whether clients receive one consolidated position or several partial ones. Confused clients pay late for reasons that have nothing to do with willingness.
What to do with the carrying cost figure
The carrying cost is the number worth taking to a partners' meeting, because it converts an operational irritation into a line item. It is also conservative: it counts only the cost of funding the gap, not the write-offs that aged WIP produces, and not the partner hours spent chasing.
The only benchmark that matters
There are published industry averages for this, and we have deliberately not put one on the bar above. An average is a poor target: a firm that beats it is not necessarily doing well, it is doing better than a profession that collectively carries too much lock-up. Being told you are seven days better than average is an invitation to do nothing.
The number that should drive decisions is the carrying cost, because it is calculated from your own figures and it does not go out of date. The comparison that should drive decisions is against your own firm, measured monthly. A practice moving from 85 days to 70 is doing better than one sitting flat at 72, whatever any average says.
Calculate it again at the end of next month. The direction of travel will tell you more than any industry study.