State of Spend 2027 Reveals $27.9 Billion Working Capital Opportunity in Enterprise Payment Term

Top-quartile companies secure 25 more days of payment terms than bottom-quartile companies in the same industry and category, a gap worth about $68 million of working capital per $1 billion of annual spend.

PRESS RELEASE
Helsinki, Finland, October 13, 2026

Large enterprises across ten industries could free up a combined $27.9 billion in working capital by matching the top-quartile supplier payment terms in their industry. That's according to State of Spend 2027, Sievo's procurement benchmark report published today.

Unlike traditional survey-based benchmarks, State of Spend is built entirely on actual transaction data. Sievo processes spend data equivalent to 2% of global GDP annually, and the report's benchmarks are calculated from anonymized and aggregated purchase orders, invoices, and supplier transactions recorded between July 2025 and June 2026.

The benchmarks come from Sievo Community Data, which covers more than 11 billion transaction rows and 100 million suppliers, contributed by Sievo customers who have contractually consented to share their data for benchmarking.

The headline payment term opportunity stems from how differently companies in the same industry negotiate payment terms for the same purchases:

• Indirect spend, which covers marketing, logistics, professional services, IT, and other operating costs, accounts for $16.5B of the estimated $ 27.9 B.
• Across Indirect spend, the gap in payment terms between top- and bottom-quartile companies ranges from 7 days in Financial & Professional Services to 41 days in Consumer Goods.
• At the category level, the differences widen further. Top-quartile Food & Beverage companies pay their cocoa and industrial chocolate suppliers after 85 days, while bottom-quartile companies pay after 42 days.
• The estimate is calculated for each spend category. It takes the gap in days between the payment terms of the top 25% and the bottom 25% of companies and applies it to the category's total analyzed spend. The results are then added up across all categories.

State of Spend 2027 is the most comprehensive edition to date, published as ten individual industry reports. Procurement leaders can compare their payment terms and purchase order coverage with top, median, and bottom performers in their industry and identify the biggest performance gaps by category.

Each report benchmarks payment terms and PO coverage against industry peers, while the Sievo Price Index tracks changes in prices paid for direct materials, packaging and indirect categories, including those without a public market index. Supplier concentration, category-level spend trends since 2023 and comparisons with the cross-industry median provide additional context.

The 10 industry reports can be downloaded free of charge at sievo.com/state-of-spend

About the data

State of Spend 2027 is based on Sievo Community Data: anonymized, aggregated procurement transactions from Sievo's customers that have given explicit, opt-in contractual consent to contribute. Participating companies are large enterprises, typically with annual revenue above $1 billion.

Benchmarks cover July 2025 to June 2026 and compare each company with its peers in the same industry. Cross-industry figures are calculated across Sievo's entire opt-in customer base. Top and bottom quartiles are defined as the 75th and 25th percentiles of each industry peer group on each metric. For metrics where a lower value is stronger, such as spend as a share of revenue, the order is reversed. Benchmarks are published only where the underlying data meets Sievo's minimum aggregation requirements.

About Sievo

Sievo is the procurement analytics layer that turns your spend data into reliable intelligence, enriched with community benchmarks covering 2%+ of global GDP. It powers better decisions across your teams, your AI agents, and tools you run. Designed for large enterprises with $1B+ in revenue, loved by global companies featuring Mars, Levi's, and Carlsberg, and praised by key analysts, we provide a future-proof solution with 63X ROI. To learn more, visit sievo.com

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Aino Häkkinen
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aino.hakkinen@sievo.com