Use MS Azure Data Factory to speed up your cash conversion cycle

A practical blog series on how to get, transform and store API data using Azure tools.

Cashflow can be a challenge. You have to pay your suppliers in 30 days, but your clients only pay in 60 to 90 days. You can use factoring to bridge this divide. Talk to your bank to see if your business is eligible for this kind of pre-financing.

Factoring is an option a CFO has to get cash from the bank as soon as a sales invoice is booked, long before the clients pay their invoices. This lowers the liquidity measure Days Sales Outstanding (DSO) and speeds up the cash conversion cycle (CCC) to avoid cashflow problems in businesses with longer payment terms, or with clients that tend to pay their invoices too late. The bank provides the cash, and in return takes a commission on the factored amounts.

In this series of blogposts I will describe how to use Postman, Azure Data Factory, Azure SQL Database and Azure Blob Storage to connect to the Exact Online API to collect outstanding sales invoices and debtors to send to the bank for factoring.

My first focus with Xudo is leadership alignment around data strategy and the development of data strategy roadmaps. In other words putting technological and organizational building blocks on a roadmap to go from where you are to where you want to be to use data to create value. Once this is done we flesh out these building blocks and scoped them in detail, after which we look for a partner to implement them. During the initial implementation I keep an eye on things as a product manager or sparring partner of the business sponsor.

Having said this, it is always nice to know how the different tools work to be able to build said roadmap. A highly abstract roadmap without a link to a realistic implementation path has no chance to land in an organization. The combination of Azure Data Factory and Azure SQL and Blob Storage is very powerful, and I’ll keep it in the back of my mind for a lot of diverse future use cases now that I have the hang of it. Being able to deliver value for your client rapidly using data, and providing them sooner with cash by automating a factoring process is a very satisfying and concrete way to do so.

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