Monitor Cash & Inventory Health

Cash & Inventory Health is the section of the Command Center that answers the question your bank balance keeps asking: how much of your money is sitting on a shelf instead of in your account? Five tiles show how long your cash takes to come back, how much of it is trapped in stock that is barely selling, and how much revenue is about to walk into an empty shelf.

What the Cash & Inventory Health section is

It sits on the Command Center, below Business Lines: five tiles under the heading Cash & Inventory Health, carrying two badges — Snapshot and All Channels — and the subhead “Current cash cycle and trapped capital.”

Those two badges are the whole orientation, and they are worth reading before the numbers.

Snapshot means right now, not a period. Every other section on this page measures a window of time. This one measures the state of your stock at this moment. That is why the date selector at the top of the page does not move these tiles, and why the useful comparison is against what you saw last week rather than against anything else on the screen.

All Channels means all of it. The DTC Performance Snapshot is direct-to-consumer only, and Business Lines splits your sales four ways. This section does neither, on purpose. A unit on a shelf is your capital no matter who eventually buys it, so the cash math covers the whole catalogue.

The section renders only once MarginOS has inventory figures for your account. Until then it is absent rather than showing you five empty tiles.

Before you start

You need a connected Shopify store with at least one completed sync, so MarginOS knows what is on hand and how fast it is moving.

You also need unit costs, and this is what most often stops the section working. Four of the five tiles are money figures, and a unit with no cost cannot be valued. Set your store-wide cost fallbacks so nothing falls through, then read how MarginOS grades cost accuracy to see what the figures are standing on.

If a warehouse or third-party logistics provider holds your stock, connect it as well — ShipStation is one of the supported feeds. Without one, MarginOS works from what your store reports.

Read your cash and inventory health in five steps

1. Start with Cash Conversion Days. It is the headline of the section: on average, how many days pass between paying for stock and getting that money back from customers. Lower is better. If it reads N/A, the tile tells you why directly underneath, and that reason is usually missing costs.
2. Read the two slow/dead tiles as one thought. Slow / Dead Inventory % tells you what share of your stock value is barely moving; Cash Stuck in Slow/Dead Stock tells you what that share is worth in dollars. The percentage tells you how bad the problem is. The dollar figure tells you whether it is worth an afternoon.
3. Check Avg Weeks of Cover for the opposite problem. This is a revenue-weighted average of how many weeks of selling your current stock covers, so your busiest products count most. A high number means buffer, and buffer is cash you have already spent. A low number means you are running lean, which is efficient right up until it is a stockout.
4. Check Revenue at Stockout Risk last. It is the share of the last 30 days’ revenue coming from products projected to run out before new stock arrives. Hover the information icon and it names the dollar amount at risk. This is the one tile on the section that is about revenue you are going to lose rather than cash you have already tied up.
5. Read the notes underneath before you act on any of it. When MarginOS has had to exclude or estimate something, a Data health & assumptions block appears below the tiles saying exactly what and why. Those notes change how you should read the five numbers above them.

The five tiles

Tile	What it reads	What it is telling you
Cash Conversion Days	A number of days, or N/A	How long your money spends as stock before it comes back as cash. Lower means you can reinvest sooner. Its own subline puts it plainly: “From paying for stock to getting the cash back.”
Slow / Dead Inventory %	A percentage “of inventory”, or N/A, or Unreliable	The share of your stock value sitting in products that are selling very slowly or not at all — “Share of stock that’s barely moving.”
Cash Stuck in Slow/Dead Stock	A dollar amount, or N/A, or Unreliable	The same problem priced. This is money you have already spent that is not working — freeing it with pricing, promotion or liquidation puts it back in play.
Avg Weeks of Cover	A number of weeks, or N/A	“Revenue-weighted average sales cover across the catalog.” Lower means lean or fast-selling; higher means more buffer and more cash tied up.
Revenue at Stockout Risk	A percentage, or N/A	“Share of revenue from SKUs projected to stock out.” The information icon names the dollar figure behind the percentage.

Tiles turn amber, and Revenue at Stockout Risk turns red, once a figure passes the point where it deserves attention rather than a glance. The colour is a prompt, not a verdict — a lean cover figure is a warning for a brand with slow restocking and a normal Tuesday for one that reorders weekly.

How MarginOS calculates what you see here

Cash Conversion Days is the textbook cash cycle: the value of the stock you are holding, measured against what that stock costs you to sell over a year, expressed in days. Hold more stock at the same sales rate and the number rises. Sell the same stock faster and it falls.

Slow / Dead Inventory % is the value of stock classified as slow or dead divided by the value of all your on-hand stock. Cash Stuck in Slow/Dead Stock is the top half of that fraction on its own. The classification comes from projecting how long your current stock would take to clear at its recent selling rate: a product that would take a long time is slow, and one that would take far longer, or is not selling at all, is dead. A product needs a handful of units on hand before it can be called dead, so the last few units of a discontinued product are not counted as trapped capital; a product with only those few units left at a dead pace is left out of both tiles. New products get a grace period first, so a product you launched last week is never called dead for having no history yet.

Avg Weeks of Cover averages each product’s weeks of cover weighted by revenue, not by unit count, so your best sellers move the number and a long tail of tiny SKUs does not.

Revenue at Stockout Risk compares the revenue earned by products projected to run out before replenishment against your total revenue for the same recent period.

Two rules run underneath all four. The first is that a unit with no known cost is never valued at zero — it is excluded and disclosed, which is why the tiles can say N/A and why the word “modeled” appears when only part of your catalogue is costed. The second is the principle the section states on its own face, under the help icon beside Data health & assumptions: “we never fudge the math to hide bad data; we surface bad data so you can fix it.” If your catalogue settings are wrong, MarginOS tells you rather than quietly absorbing it. Why MarginOS shows N/A instead of a made-up number covers the stance in full.

Example

A brand opens the Command Center and sees Cash Conversion Days 118 days in amber, Slow / Dead Inventory % 26% of modeled inventory, Cash Stuck in Slow/Dead Stock $84,000 (modeled), Avg Weeks of Cover 14.2 wks and Revenue at Stockout Risk 7%.

Read together, that is a clear story and it is not a stockout story. Nearly four months pass between paying for stock and getting the cash back, fourteen weeks of cover is a lot of shelf, and a quarter of the stock value is barely moving. The money is not missing — it is in the warehouse.

The word “modeled” on two tiles is the second half of the story. Underneath the tiles a DATA INCOMPLETE note says how many products have no cost data and are therefore not included in the trapped capital math. So $84,000 is the floor, not the total. The first action is not a liquidation sale; it is fixing those product costs, because the real figure can only be larger.

Common questions

Why does Cash Conversion Days read N/A?

Because MarginOS could not value your stock, and it will not print a number it cannot stand behind. The tile says which case you are in. If products are missing costs, it names how many products and how many units and tells you to fix the base product cost to unlock the metric. If nothing is connected yet, it says so and points you at connecting your warehouse or 3PL. A zero here would read as a flawless instant cash cycle, which is the opposite of the truth, so you get N/A instead.

Why do two tiles say “Unreliable” instead of a number?

Because the same physical stock appears to be counted more than once. When one product is listed across several listings or variants, its units get counted once per listing, and the duplicated value can grow to the size of your entire modeled stock value or beyond. At that point the slow/dead figures would swing between refreshes while your actual shelf sat still, so MarginOS shows Unreliable and the note “Modeled inventory is duplicated across listings — resolve duplication to see accurate cash-at-risk.” The over-count note below carries a View affected SKUs link straight into Catalog Profit with the duplicates already filtered.

What does “modeled” mean on these tiles?

It means part of your catalogue has no unit cost, so the figure covers only the part MarginOS can value. You will see it as “% of modeled inventory” and “(modeled)” on the dollar figure, and the helper text says outright that the real trapped cash is likely higher. It is a completeness label, not a quality label — the math on the costed portion is exact.

Why are some of my products excluded from the cash math?

Two cases, and both are disclosed by name underneath the tiles rather than applied silently. Products set to continue selling when out of stock in Shopify are treated as non-binding inventory, because their counts are not a reliable statement of what is on a shelf. Products tagged Shopify Collective are dropshipped — supplier-held stock, not your capital. In both cases MarginOS leaves them out of inventory value, weeks of cover, slow/dead cash-trap and stockout risk, while still counting their sales toward Cash Conversion Days. Each note tells you the change that pulls them back in: switching to tracked inventory with “deny when out of stock”, or removing the Shopify Collective tag.

Why is a brand-new product not showing as dead stock?

Because it has not had time to prove anything. A product with no selling history yet is given a grace period before the slow and dead classifications apply to it, so a launch that has not found its feet yet is not counted as trapped capital. Once it has sales history behind it, it is judged on the same basis as everything else.

Related

• Read the Command Center — the page this section lives on, and what every other section does.
• Read Catalog Profit — where you go to fix the products these tiles are complaining about.
• The Defensible Profit Model — how MarginOS grades the cost accuracy every money figure here depends on.
• Data Trust levels — how much of your catalogue is running on evidence rather than assumption.
• Why MarginOS shows “N/A” instead of a made-up number — the stance behind every N/A on this section.