The 1,000 largest U.S. companies by sales have as much as $590 billion of excess working capital tied up in unpaid customer invoices, suppliers being paid too early and inventories lying unsold on warehouse shelves, according to a recent 2004 cash flow survey by Purchase, N.Y.-based REL Consultancy Group. And Douglas Swafford, credit and collections manager at truckload carrier U.S. Xpress Enterprises Inc., can be thankful that at least his company's contribution to this massive overhang has been sizably reduced.

How'd Swafford pull it off? He simply did a much better job of collecting overdue bills from U.S. Xpress' customers. By installing the collections software of Parsippany, N.J.-based GetPaid Corp., Swafford was able to reduce past due accounts receivable by 25% and days sales outstanding (DSO) by 29% in the first full year of using the technology. His department at the Chattanooga,Tenn.-based company slashed open disputed items to just 1,642 from 12,500. "The improvement that we made in our DSO last year paid virtually for all of my department's budget," says Swafford. "It's a valuable tool to get that extra effort out of your people. It makes them more productive."

Optimizing working capital is no small feat.Why? "Working capital seems to be such an elusive thing for organizations because it is so complicated," says REL's CEO Stephen Payne. "There's no function in the business that's not involved in [the calculation of] working capital."