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: the KPI shows €28,400 plus an 11-SKU coverage gap, rather than a falsely precise total that silently valued those units at zero. Confirming those 11 costs is the fastest way to make the number 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 — the same cost source the margin metrics use, so dead cash and COGS never disagree about what a unit cost. Uncosted stock carries NULL cash (unknown, not zero) and is surfaced as an uncosted-SKU count beside the total; valuing it at zero would understate locked capital exactly the way COGS-as-zero once overstated margin.

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.
• Watching the total while the coverage gap grows. A flat dead-cash figure with a rising uncosted count is a worsening picture in disguise.
• 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, with its uncosted-SKU coverage note.