Damon Boswell breaks down why 42% of companies lose 1-5% of EBITDA to revenue leakage every year — and the order-to-cash framework that stops earned revenue from quietly slipping away.
There is a number Damon Boswell now writes on the whiteboard in nearly every revenue assurance engagement, and it is the one most leadership teams find hardest to believe: 42% of companies experience some form of revenue leakage, and those that do should expect to lose between 1% and 5% of their realized EBITDA every year as a result. The figures, drawn from MGI Research and reinforced by EY's finding that companies lose 1% to 5% of realized EBITA annually to leakage, mean that a mid-market business doing $50 million in revenue with a 15% EBITDA margin is quietly losing between $75,000 and $375,000 of profit it already earned — every single year, recurring, compounding, and invisible on any single line item. Revenue leakage is not a sales problem. It is the discipline of capturing the revenue the business has already won, and it is the discipline most mid-market companies have never built because the leak is silent and the loss is never itemized.
The scale of what is slipping away is what surprises most leadership teams. Boston Consulting Group reported that 45% of executives see revenue leakage as a systematic problem for their companies, and independent industry research consistently shows that between 3% and 7% of earned revenue is never fully captured each year. Ashley Boswell translates that into terms a CFO can feel: revenue leakage is not a single catastrophic failure. It is the accumulation of a thousand small gaps — the invoice that was never sent, the discount that was never approved, the usage that was never metered, the contract term that was never enforced — each one too small to trigger an alarm and collectively large enough to erase a meaningful share of the year's profit. A business that grows its top line by 10% while leaking 5% of what it earns has worked an entire year to produce half the profit the growth suggested.
The root cause, as Damon Boswell diagnoses it, is that most growing companies treat revenue as a sales outcome rather than an order-to-cash process. The deal closes, the team celebrates, and then the revenue travels through a gauntlet of handoffs — from sales to operations, operations to billing, billing to collections — each one a point where revenue can quietly detach from the transaction that produced it. The handoffs are where the leakage lives, because no single function owns the full path from the signed contract to the collected dollar, and a gap that no one owns is a gap no one closes. Salesforce's research is direct on this point: revenue leakage is revenue you have already effectively earned but failed to collect due to a gap in one or more of your business processes. The earning is not the problem. The collecting is.
Ashley Boswell structures a revenue leakage engagement around four pillars, and she is explicit that the audit comes before the fix. The first pillar is the leakage audit — the systematic mapping of the order-to-cash process to identify every point where earned revenue can detach. The audit almost always surprises the leadership team, because the gaps it surfaces are not the gaps anyone suspected. The most common findings are unbilled usage, where the business delivered a service it never metered or invoiced; pricing discrepancies, where the contracted price and the invoiced price diverged and no one reconciled them; and scope creep, where services were delivered beyond the contract and never billed because no one flagged the boundary. A leakage audit that finds nothing is almost always an audit that looked in the wrong places, because the research is consistent that the leakage is there.
The second pillar is contract-to-bill reconciliation, and it is where Damon Boswell sees the largest single source of leakage in most mid-market companies. The contract says one thing, the CRM says another, and the invoice reflects neither — and the three are never reconciled against each other. A customer negotiated a 10% volume discount that was applied to the first invoice and then forgotten. A price increase was approved in the contract but never loaded into the billing system. A promotional rate expired six months ago and the customer is still paying the lower price. Each discrepancy is small. Aggregated across a customer base of hundreds, they represent the majority of the leakage the business is carrying. The discipline is a recurring reconciliation — the contracted terms, the delivered services, and the invoiced amounts compared against each other on a defined cadence, with the variances investigated and closed.
The third pillar is billing accuracy and automation, and Ashley Boswell is precise about the economics. Manual billing processes are the single largest contributor to revenue leakage, because a human who manually generates an invoice will, at scale, produce errors — the wrong line item, the wrong quantity, the wrong discount, the missed surcharge. Zenskar's 2026 research found that SaaS companies alone lose 1% to 5% of revenue to billing errors, contract mismatches, and failed collections. The discipline is to automate the billing process wherever the volume justifies it, so that the invoice is generated from the same system that tracks the contracted terms and the delivered usage — eliminating the manual handoff where the error enters. A billing process that is automated end to end does not leak at the handoff, because there is no handoff.
The fourth pillar, and the one Damon Boswell argues determines whether the recovery sustains, is the collections discipline — because revenue that is invoiced but never collected is revenue that has leaked just as surely as revenue that was never billed. The most common failure mode he sees is the business that fixes its billing and then ignores its receivables, watching the days sales outstanding climb while the cash the invoice represents never arrives. The discipline is a managed collections cadence: every invoice tracked to payment, every overdue account escalated on a defined timeline, and every dispute resolved before it becomes a write-off. An invoice that ages past ninety days is an invoice the business is increasingly unlikely to collect, and the discipline of acting before that threshold is what separates the revenue that is captured from the revenue that is merely invoiced.
Ashley Boswell is candid about why mid-market companies resist building this discipline. Revenue leakage feels like a back-office problem — a billing and collections issue to be delegated to the finance team, not a strategy decision to be owned by leadership. But the resistance misunderstands the economics in two ways. First, the cost of leakage is never visible on a single line item; it is hidden in the gap between the revenue the business earned and the revenue it collected, a gap that no standard financial statement isolates and that therefore goes unmeasured and unmanaged. Second, the recovery is among the highest-ROI work available to a mid-market business, because it requires no new customers, no new capacity, and no new market entry to capture — it is profit the business has already produced and simply failed to collect. A business that treats revenue assurance as a finance function is a business that has decided to keep earning revenue it will never see.
The measurement layer is what makes revenue leakage recovery defensible rather than theoretical. Damon Boswell tracks four metrics together: the leakage rate (the gap between earned revenue and collected revenue, expressed as a percentage, the headline number that tells you how much is slipping away), the billing accuracy rate (the share of invoices generated without error on the first pass, the process measure that tells you where the leak originates), the contract-to-bill variance (the aggregate dollar gap between contracted terms and invoiced amounts, the measure that tells you whether the reconciliation is holding), and the days sales outstanding (the collections measure that tells you whether the invoiced revenue is actually arriving). A falling leakage rate with a rising DSO means the billing is fixed but the collections are failing — the leak has moved downstream, not closed. A stable leakage rate with a high billing accuracy rate means the leak is not in billing but in the contract terms or the usage metering. Read together, these metrics tell the leadership team whether the order-to-cash process is capturing the revenue it earns or quietly releasing it.
Revenue leakage is not a cost of doing business. It is the discipline of collecting the profit the business has already earned — a leakage audit, contract-to-bill reconciliation, billing automation, and a collections cadence that closes every gap between the signed contract and the collected dollar. Damon Boswell and Ashley Boswell help leadership teams build that discipline so the revenue the business wins actually arrives in the bank, rather than slipping silently through the handoffs no one owns. Because the businesses that capture the most profit are not always the ones that sell the most. They are the ones that collect what they earn. That is the work, and it is the work Blueprint Business Advisors was built to do.
