What does a Cash Officer FTE own?
A Cash Officer FTE on ftes.ai owns the working capital a store holds as inventory. It sits in the Finance department of the e-commerce org chart, is judged on cash released, and is accountable for one outcome: cash released from stock, measured against days of inventory. It exists because the single biggest lever at most stores' size, the length of the stock cycle, usually lives in a spreadsheet nobody has time to open.
It does not own the buy, the allocation or the price. The Buyer FTE, the Allocator FTE and the Pricing Officer FTE own those. The Cash Officer FTE owns the cash view across all of them and the decisions that release it.
Where do its numbers come from?
The Cash Officer FTE values stock on hand at landed cost, taken from the Controller FTE where the store runs one or from the owner's landed-cost sheet, and ages each SKU's stock from receipt dates. Days of inventory comes from stock and velocity in the store's own orders. The cash conversion cycle comes from supplier payment terms, receipt dates and customer cash, read from purchase orders and orders. The carrying-cost rate, capital, storage, obsolescence and opportunity together, is the one input the owner sets, in the Setup tab, and it is shown on every proposal.
Nothing is benchmarked. A store's days of inventory are compared with its own history and its own targets, not with an industry figure the FTE cannot verify.
How does the markdown-versus-hold arithmetic work?
For every SKU with more cover than the owner's threshold, the Cash Officer FTE compares two paths. Hold: keep the stock, pay the carrying cost for the days it will take to sell at current velocity, and receive full price. Mark down: discount to a price that sells within a shorter window, pay less carrying cost, and receive less per unit. The proposal shows both totals and recommends the path that returns more cash, with the Pricing Officer FTE's floor respected and seasonality flagged where a season returns before the hold window ends.
A labelled worked example, illustrative only: six SKUs hold sixty-one thousand at landed cost with over one hundred and ninety days of cover. For four of them, carrying cost within sixty days exceeds the discount needed to sell them; for two, the season returns first. The proposal marks down four and holds two, and records the release at thirty-eight thousand, the low end of its range, not the fifty-two thousand midpoint.
What does it propose, and what waits for approval?
The Cash Officer FTE proposes releases: markdowns routed through the Pricing Officer FTE or the Retention FTE, transfers to a channel where the SKU sells faster with the Allocator FTE, bundles with healthy stock, returns to supplier where terms allow, and reorder stops on slow lines, which cost nothing. Every proposal is a card in Approvals with the arithmetic, the carrying-cost rate, the floor and the cash it would release at the low end.
Nothing changes a price, moves a unit or writes off stock until the owner approves it. A declined proposal is recorded in the value ledger as forgone, with the cash it would have released, so the owner can see the cost of holding as clearly as the cost of discounting.
What does the Cash Officer FTE never do?
It never raises finance, negotiates supplier terms or writes off stock; those are the owner's and the accountant's decisions. It never reports cash 'identified' as if it were released; only cash that moved is posted as realised. It never proposes a markdown below a floor the Pricing Officer FTE holds, and it never proposes a markdown on a seasonal line ahead of its season without saying so.
It also never presents a mid-point as a result. The value ledger records the low end of every range, and the Cash Officer FTE's reported number is the ledger's, not its own estimate.
What does it report, and how honestly?
The Cash Officer FTE reports cash in stock at landed cost, days of inventory against the owner's target, the cash conversion cycle, cash in dead and slow stock against the ceiling, and cash released this month tied to the decisions that released it. It reports releases declined as forgone, and it reports the carrying-cost rate and landed costs it used so the owner can challenge either.
Cash released is the number it is judged on, and it is measured after the fact from stock and orders, never projected from a proposal.
How does it work with the other roles, and in which tools?
The Cash Officer FTE takes landed cost from the Controller FTE, hands markdowns to the Pricing Officer or Retention FTE, transfers to the Allocator FTE, and reorder stops to the Buyer and Inventory FTEs; the Chief of Staff FTE resolves its conflicts with the Buyer FTE on the morning page. It reads stock, receipts and orders from Shopify, WooCommerce or BigCommerce, or from NetSuite, Cin7 or Linnworks where the store keeps stock there, and supplier terms from the purchase order history.
It is one of the three roles the e-commerce org chart leads with, because the money it works on is the largest and the least contested a store of size has.