Working Capital Cycle

The number of days between paying your suppliers and receiving the cash from the sales those supplies generate.

The working capital cycle measures how long your cash is tied up in the business: the gap between paying suppliers and collecting the revenue that stock or ingredients help produce.

• Working capital cycle = days to pay suppliers − days to collect revenue

Restaurants are unusual because customers pay immediately while suppliers are paid on terms, so well-run sites often run a negative cycle (cash in before cash out), typically 5 to 15 days. A cycle above 30 days usually signals trouble: cash is trapped and a bad week can quickly become a cash gap. It sits alongside cash resilience and prime cost as a core measure of operating discipline, and Alpa reads it straight from your live bank and P&L data.