Most sales teams assume their quote-to-cash cycle is a revenue problem. It isn't—it's a process problem. A deal closes on day 5, but cash doesn't post until day 45. In the middle: nine approval handoffs, each one a person waiting for an email, a folder they don't know how to find, or a document that arrived in the wrong format. We mapped nine handoffs across 30 teams using Orin's CRM pipeline and contract automation. The median time spent in actual approval: 3 days. The median time spent waiting: 17 days. The difference is process friction, not complexity. Here's where it stalls and how to fix it. Where the 20 days vanish: nine handoffs mapped Your deal doesn't move because someone is waiting. Not for a decision—for a message that a decision was made. Sales quote creation (Day 1): Sales rep builds quote, hits send. Approval clock starts. Finance pre-check (Days 2–3): Finance rules out obvious issues (wrong currency, missing cost basis, discount tier out of bounds). Manual email review. Contract template selection (Day 4): Sales or legal needs to pick the right template. Often lives in a folder link nobody remembers. Legal review (Days 5–10): Legal has your contract queued behind 12 others. No SLA. No escalation path. CFO approval on non-standard terms (Days 11–15): If payment terms or discount exceed thresholds, CFO reviews. Frequently the last person to know the deal exists. Customer signature collection (Days 16–25): E-signature sent. Customer's legal reads it. Nobody chases follow-up. Revenue recognition (Days 26–35): Finance posts to GL, reconciles contract terms against invoice terms (often they don't match). Invoice creation (Days 36–40): Billing team rebuilds what sales promised into invoice line items. Frequently wrong. Posting and cash reconciliation (Days 41–45): Invoice posts to AR. Bank deposit arrives. AR closes the deal. Every handoff is a queue. Every queue is a person who doesn't know you're waiting. The lever that moves eight days: conditional routing Your first win is removing the routing decision from a human email queue. Conditional routing in a CRM workflow evaluates the deal data and sends the quote to the right approver before anyone has to ask. Set this up in three rules: Finance pre-check goes automatic if discount ≤ 15% and contract value ≤ ₹25L: Skip the manual review. Finance only touches deals that break policy. Saves 1–2 days. Legal review routes to the right lawyer by deal type: Complex contracts (multi-year, non-standard payment, regulated customer) go to Senior Counsel. Simple renewals go to Paralegal. Paralegal clears 80% in 2 days; Senior Counsel averages 6. Saves 1–2 days on average. CFO approval only routes if discount > 15% OR contract value > ₹25L: CFO doesn't see deals that fit policy. Saves 3–4 days by removing a queue entirely. These three rules alone collapse Days 2–15 to Days 2–8. You've just removed 7 days by answering the question 'who should approve this?' with logic instead of email. SLA alerts: move deals before they stall Conditional routing removes routing delay. SLA alerts remove waiting-for-response delay. Set an SLA on each approval step. When the approver doesn't move the deal within the SLA window, escalate automatically. Finance pre-check SLA: 4 hours (high volume, low complexity). Escalate to Finance Manager if pending. Legal review SLA: 2 business days (most deals fit standard terms). Escalate to Practice Lead if pending. CFO approval SLA: 1 business day (rare; should be fast). Escalate to CEO or Board Secretary if pending. Customer signature SLA: 3 business days (after send). Auto-send reminder to customer contact; notify Sales of pending status. The alert doesn't force approval. It forces visibility. A deal stuck in Legal for five days isn't a legal delay—it's a communication delay. The alert surfaces it in 48 hours. In one team of 12 sales reps, SLA alerts alone reduced legal review from 7 days (average) to 4.5 days, because the legal team saw the backlog and triaged. No new process. Just visibility. Document auto-routing and version control: stop the 'which draft do I sign?' delay A contract gets approved, then sales sends the wrong version to the customer. Customer's lawyer asks for a revision. The revision goes back to legal. You've added 5 days. Automate document routing using a single source of truth in your CRM. When a quote moves to 'approved,' the CRM automatically: Pulls the correct contract template based on deal type (new customer, renewal, multi-year, etc.) Merges in deal data (contract value, payment terms, start date, renewal date) from the deal record. Generates a single PDF version with version control metadata. Routes the PDF to the e-signature platform. Links the signed document back to the deal in the CRM. No email. No folder confusion. No 'I'll send you the latest version.' The system generates one version from one template using one source of truth. When the customer signs, that signature is locked to that exact version, whic