5 hidden order-to-cash challenges that drain revenue before anyone notices

In many organizations, orders still come in through a mix of channels: email, PDFs, Excel files, Word documents and, in some cases, even paper. Each member of the Sales Ops team receives them in their own personal inbox, often with no consistent way to capture, route or prioritize them.

The result is a decentralized process. Sales Ops staff across multiple countries may all be receiving orders separately, with no central point of control and no single view of who received what or where an order currently sits. According to Gartner, it’s issues like these that have teams spending 47% of the day just trying to find information.

But this does more than slow things down. It introduces real risk. Orders get missed, duplicated or delayed simply because they are not visible in one shared place. And when there is no clear ownership, even basic handoffs become harder than they should be. That is especially true in larger SAP environments, where orders are coming in across regions, inboxes and formats at the same time.  

Even in SAP-driven environments, teams are still manually entering order data, which can attract an error rate of up to 26.9%. The scene is a familiar one: a team member opens a PDF or email, copies the details across and builds the order line by line inside classic SAP transaction screens like VA01, VA02 or VA03.

Every manual step is a chance for something to go wrong, but a mistake in pricing, quantity or delivery details does not stay isolated. It flows through to fulfilment, invoicing and customer communication. If the underlying data is incomplete or inaccurate, the problems do not stop at order entry.

What starts as a small data entry error can quickly become:

• A delayed shipment
• A disputed invoice
• A customer escalation

Over time, these inaccuracies add up and create a level of friction that is genuinely hard to dig out of.  

Nearly half (43%) of surveyed supply chain professionals struggle to maintain full visibility into their supply chains. This is one of the most common frustrations for Sales Ops teams, and it's easy to see why. Without a central view, even basic questions become hard to answer:

• Has the order been created yet?
• Is someone already working on it?
• Is there a discrepancy against an existing quotation?

For so many teams, these are very real and daily realities when managing high order volumes across multiple regions.

The knock-on effect is that people spend time chasing orders and status updates instead of focusing on work that actually moves revenue forward. Problems also tend to surface late. By the time discrepancies in price, quantity or delivery date are noticed, they may already be affecting delivery timelines or customer expectations. The underlying issue is not just visibility in the abstract. It’s the absence of one place to see who is doing what, what is stuck and what needs attention first.

As order volumes climb, manual processes start to hit their ceiling. What once felt manageable becomes harder to sustain, and the strain quickly spreads beyond the Sales Ops team. Orders take longer to process, delays start affecting shipping and invoicing, and the likelihood of mistakes rises with every extra manual step. Research has found that manual processes are responsible for up to 71% of supply chain errors, which shows how quickly things can start to unravel as volume increases.

For companies running just-in-time or just-in-sequence operations, the consequences are even more serious. When order confirmations arrive late or are handled too slowly, the impact does not stay contained to admin work. It can throw tightly planned schedules off track and create disruption further downstream.

The issue isn’t that teams are not working hard enough. It’s that the process itself does not scale with demand. When people are tied up with manual order entry and data checking, they have less capacity for the work that actually helps the business move forward, whether that’s improving forecasts, resolving exceptions early or supporting revenue-critical activity.

When documents are handled manually and scattered across inboxes and systems, record-keeping gets messy fast. Recent audit monitoring by ICAS found that documentation was one of the most common problem areas, with breaches of documentation standards identified in 92% of visits.

As we mentioned earlier, this because most teams end up relying on inboxes, attachments and disconnected system entries to piece together the history of an order, which makes audits slower, weakens accountability and leaves the business in a worse position when disputes, internal reviews or regulatory questions come up.  

Order-to-cash usually gets judged on outcomes — did the order move, did the customer get what they needed, did the revenue land on time. But underneath all of that is a lot of process work that nobody really sees. When that work is fragmented or manual or just hard to track, the pressure builds quietly. And by the time it starts showing up in the business, it's usually been a problem for a while.

If your team is dealing with that kind of hidden pressure, it helps to see what a more connected O2C approach looks like. Click here to learn more.