US Companies Have $1.76 Trillion Opportunity to Free Up Cash

With rates expected to stay high for a while, corporate finance chiefs have a strong incentive to skip debt markets and free up more of their companies’ cash instead. And it turns out, they have plenty of it.

The biggest US-based companies can wring a combined $1.76 trillion from their operations by taking steps to tighten up how they manage key areas such as inventory and payments, according to preliminary research from consulting firm Hackett Group Inc.

Hackett’s analysis focuses on a metric known as working capital performance, which gauges how efficiently a company runs its day-to-day business. The ...