Expert Insights: Mid-Year Reset: Now is the Right Time for a Working Capital Assessment
Kathryn Albright, EVP, Head of Global Payments & Deposits
Working capital optimization has become a top strategic imperative for companies of all sizes as businesses navigate rising costs, uncertainty, and evolving supply chain disruptions. Businesses need more liquidity to absorb potential disruptions and navigate a higher cost of doing business. This is putting more pressure on companies to improve their cash conversion cycle so they can collect cash faster, make payments more intelligently, and ultimately generate the working capital and liquidity they need.
According to PYMNTS Intelligence‘s recently published Growth Corporates Working Capital Index, middle market businesses freed up, on average, $19 million in 2025 by deploying working capital tools. To help small and middle market businesses find new and creative ways to unlock working capital, Columbia Bank offers an obligation-free Working Capital Assessment program.
In this Q&A, Kathryn Albright discusses how a Working Capital Assessment can help a business identify practical steps to create efficiencies and reduce expenses, and why it is never too early or too late to look for opportunities to unlock working capital.
Q: What is a Working Capital Assessment and why is it valuable for businesses?
A Working Capital Assessment is a structured analysis that helps businesses identify inefficiencies, optimize financial processes, and unlock measurable liquidity.
For example, many businesses we hear from are eager to move forward with strategic investments such as ERP transformations or AI deployments, yet they still have not addressed their back-office inefficiencies. These investment decisions should serve as inflection points to think about whether the business has the proper finance and accounting infrastructure in place. Not only are these back-office efficiencies essential for realizing ROI on larger enterprise investments, but they can also unlock significant capital to deploy toward such investments.
Today’s economic environment is challenging for businesses large and small, and it is extremely valuable to have this kind of third-party analysis to identify operational gaps and inefficiencies that may be costing your business. Columbia Bank Treasury Management consultants take the time to understand your cash flow, analyze the facts and help you find what works best for your business.
Q: What outcomes can a Working Capital Assessment deliver?
A Working Capital Assessment can unlock cost savings through payment modernization and process consolidation, improved cash flow performance and investment returns, strengthened risk management frameworks, and optimized treasury solutions.
Our team speaks with hundreds of businesses around the country and across every industry each year, and we routinely hear from our customers about how this program has delivered significant cost savings and measurable operational efficiencies.
- Accounts Payable & Accounts Receivable Consolidation: We discovered that one of our customers, a midsize law firm, was being billed for accounts payable and accounts receivable services that they were not using, along with several outdated processes. We consolidated their account structure, created clearer cashflow processes, migrated payouts from wires to ACH, and helped them adopt corporate card solutions for payables. By addressing these inefficiencies – which were not visible to the team – we helped the firm achieve estimated annual cost savings of nearly $300,000.
- Spend Optimization: A contractor that we work with maintained card programs with five different providers without any incentives. Not only were we able to help them reduce costs and eliminate the burden of managing multiple platforms, we also helped them further simplify administration by transitioning payables to card solutions. The result was $50,000 in annual cost savings with another $150,000 in potential annual rebate savings.
Q: How is Columbia Bank’s approach different from other banks with similar services?
Columbia Bank takes a consultative approach to make tailored, complimentary recommendations based on each company’s cash conversion cycle. We start by analyzing how the business collects and makes payments, then we identify opportunities to reduce expenses and map out processes that can have a significant impact on working capital. We use this approach to understand each company’s cash flow and recommend personalized options at no cost regardless of whether the business has an existing account with us or not.
The process often starts with transparent dialogue between the CFO, treasurer, and accounts payable teams. This helps surface untapped opportunities to reduce the cash conversion cycle such as automated invoicing solutions and modernized accounts payable strategies. It also helps identify gaps such as continued check usage despite ACH conversion or missed supplier discount opportunities. All these scenarios can be addressed through practical solutions that can have an outsized impact on reducing expenses and increasing cash flow.
Q: When should a business conduct a Working Capital Assessment?
It is never too early or too late for a business to begin the process of assessing working capital. In today’s fast-changing macroenvironment, businesses must continuously think about how much capital they need to run their operations, where they may need new capital for expansion or strategic investments, and what pivots they may need to make to navigate the next major disruption:
- What levers would the business pull if it had excess liquidity?
- What enterprise technology investments could the business deploy if it secured a loan in a lower interest rate environment?
- If the Fed were to lower interest rates, would a loan help secure the capital needed to invest in enterprise technology that can drive new efficiencies?
- What changes could the business make to drive supplier efficiencies amid a shifting tariff environment?
- How could the business continue to unlock working capital through process automation?
It is always helpful to understand what’s driving profitability, what processes can be fine-tuned to help drive efficiencies, and how those savings can translate to greater liquidity and interest. This is as good of a time as any to identify meaningful changes that can unlock new working capital and position the business for growth and resilience in a challenging environment.
To learn more about Columbia Bank’s Working Capital Assessment program, click here.
