What is dead cash?
Dead cash is the dead-stock problem expressed as one number: the capital locked in inventory that has stopped selling, valued at what the units cost you. Where the dead-stock widget lists the offending products, dead cash is the headline — how much money is sitting on shelves doing nothing.
Formula
dead cash = Σ quantity on hand × confirmed unit cost
over products flagged as dead stock
Worked example
A store's dead-stock list holds 62 SKUs. The 51 with confirmed costs tie up €28,400 — that is the dead-cash figure. The other 11 SKUs have no confirmed cost, so their capital is unknown: they are left out of the €28,400 rather than valued at zero, which makes the figure a floor, not the full amount. A note under the KPI says so directly — "11 SKUs have no cost on file — only 82% are costed" — because there is no honest euro amount to put on those 11 SKUs, only a count. Confirming those 11 costs is the fastest way to make the €28,400 figure complete.
How Saldo Metrics computes it
The widget sums cash_tied_base from v_inventory_position over rows flagged
is_dead_stock, honoring the org's configurable dead-stock window (default 90
days). Each product's valuation multiplies on-hand quantity from the newest
snapshot by its best confirmed cost record, resolved by the same cost rule the
margin metrics use. The date differs: margin takes the cost in effect on each
order's date, while dead cash takes the cost in effect today, so a SKU whose cost
has changed can carry a different unit cost here than in past orders' COGS.
Uncosted stock carries NULL cash (unknown, not zero) and is left out of the sum;
valuing it at zero would pass off an incomplete total as a complete one, exactly
the way COGS-as-zero once overstated margin. The KPI carries a coverage note
computed on how many of the dead-stock rows have a confirmed cost — not on
euros, since an uncosted row's cash value is unknown and there is no honest
total to turn into a percentage of money.
Why it matters
Dead cash competes directly with everything else the business wants to fund — ad budget, new inventory, opex. Framing dead stock in euros of locked capital is what makes the clearance conversation concrete: a €28,000 dead-cash figure against a €50,000 monthly ad budget says reordering discipline is worth more than another campaign optimization.
Common mistakes
- Reading dead cash as recoverable value. It is what the stock cost, not what clearance will fetch; recovery below cost is normal and still usually better than holding.
- Reading the total as complete while SKUs are uncosted. Uncosted stock is left out, so a flat dead-cash figure can hide a growing set of unvalued SKUs; the Dead Stock list shows which rows carry no value.
- Treating a seasonal trough as dead capital. With a too-short window, off-season stock inflates the figure; the window is org-configurable for this reason.
Where you see this in the app
The Dead Cash KPI on the dashboard.