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Order to cash normally refers to one of the top-level business processes for receiving and processing customer orders and revenue recognition. Other top-level business processes include "Marketing to Lead", "Opportunity to Order", "Procure-to-Pay" , "Issue to Complete" "Hire to Retire", "Concept to Launch" , "Sustain and Retain" and "Record to Report" for general ledger processes. Recently the concept of order-to-cash has been extended to "Lead to Cash" by many software providers to include also the marketing and pre-sales process steps.
The context level processes are utilized in a number of ways by businesses such as business process reengineering, aligning enterprise architectures and IT solutions as well as "blueprinting" as part of Enterprise Resource Planning systems.
In many business models, a contractual relationship is established first via a Contract or Subscription. Orders are then received via different sales channels, such as phone, fax, email, internet or salesperson. The contractual relationship is confirmed and the orders are fulfilled through shipping and logistics. On completion of key events an invoice is generated and booked as Sales. If payment has not already been received, the debt is recorded and pursued through dunning cycles until the funds are received. Order to Cash is completed by the Customer Care and Field Service and Repair process.