Work done, money not asked for
The engineer finished the job last Tuesday. The job sheet is in the van, or in an app, or in a WhatsApp photo sent to the office. The office knows the job is done in the sense that nobody is shouting about it, but the invoice has not been raised because the person who does invoicing is waiting for the materials list, or the extra hours, or confirmation of the price that was agreed on site.
Weeks later, at month end, someone runs through the job list and finds several finished jobs with no invoice. Some are easy to bill. Some have lost details, and the invoice is either delayed further or raised for less than it should be.
Why billing lags behind the work
The work and the invoicing live in different places. Jobs are tracked in a job management system, a shared calendar, a spreadsheet or someone's head. Invoices are raised in Xero or QuickBooks. The bridge between the two is a person who has to be told, collect the information, and type it in.
Extras make it worse. The quoted price is easy. The additional hours, the extra parts, the variation agreed with the customer on site: those arrive late, in different formats, and are exactly the items that get forgotten.
What unbilled work costs you
| Problem | Effect |
|---|---|
| Invoices raised weeks late | Cash arrives weeks later than it could have |
| Extras left off | Revenue lost on work you actually did |
| Customer queries on old invoices | Harder to justify charges from memory |
| Month-end billing rush | Errors made under time pressure |
| No view of unbilled work | You cannot tell what you are owed but have not asked for |
Late invoices also tend to be paid later. A customer who receives a bill a month after the work is less inclined to treat it as urgent than one who gets it the same week, while the work is still fresh in their mind.
How we automate the invoicing process
- Detect completion: a status change in your job system, a completed form in a field app, or a completed job sheet sent to an inbox and read automatically.
- Gather what was done: quoted price or rate, hours from timesheets, materials from the job sheet or stock system, extras and variations recorded against the job.
- Check it: required details present, hours reasonable for the job type, materials priced, customer PO number captured if they require one.
- Create a draft invoice in Xero or QuickBooks through the API, with the right customer, lines, tracking and job reference, and the job sheet or photos attached if you want them sent.
- Route for approval: a person reviews the draft, which takes a moment when everything is already filled in, and approves it to send.
- Keep a live list of finished-but-unbilled jobs, with the reason each is waiting, so nothing sits without someone knowing why.
For recurring work, such as monthly service contracts, the same system raises invoices on schedule and checks that the visit actually happened before billing.
What changes in the office
Invoices go out shortly after the work instead of at month end. Extras are captured because they are recorded against the job when they happen, and the invoice picks them up without anyone remembering. The office person who used to assemble invoices becomes a reviewer, and the month-end billing rush disappears because there is nothing left to catch up on.
You also get a figure you probably do not have today: the value of work completed but not yet billed, updated daily.
Engineers and site staff notice a difference too. They record extras once, against the job, in the app or on the sheet they already use, and stop getting phone calls a fortnight later asking what they did on a Tuesday. The office stops acting as a relay between the field and the accounts package and starts acting as a quality check.
Signs you are leaving money on the table
- You regularly find finished jobs without invoices at month end.
- Extras and variations are sometimes left off the bill.
- Invoicing waits for paperwork from engineers or site staff.
- Nobody can say quickly how much finished work is still unbilled.
- Customers query invoices because they arrive long after the job.