The last week of every month
Your account customers are the steady part of the business: a hospital trust's staff journeys, a solicitors' firm, a couple of hotels, a company that sends visitors from the station to its offices. They pay on invoice, and each of them wants that invoice their own way.
So at month end, someone in the office exports the account jobs from the dispatch system into a spreadsheet and starts going through them. One customer needs a purchase order number on every line. Another wants journeys split by department. A third will not pay for any journey without a passenger name. Waiting time was added by some drivers and not others. A few journeys were booked on the account by someone who was not authorised to book.
The invoices go out late. A week later, the queries start coming back.
Why the details are missing in the first place
The information is missing at the moment the job is booked, and nothing asks for it until the invoice is being built.
| Missing detail | Why it is missing | When it is noticed |
|---|---|---|
| Purchase order or reference | Call handler did not know the account needs one | At month end, or when the customer rejects the invoice |
| Cost centre or department | Booked by a PA who did not say | When the customer's finance team cannot allocate it |
| Passenger name | Booking made in the booker's name | When the customer queries who travelled |
| Waiting time and extras | Driver added it in different ways | When the fare looks wrong to the customer |
| Authorised booker | No list of who may book | When the customer refuses to pay for the journey |
Each account's rules usually live in one person's head, or in a note pinned to the wall. When that person is off, the rules are forgotten.
The cost of late and disputed invoices
Late invoices mean late payment, and your cash flow depends on account money coming in, because you are settling with drivers every week for account work they have already done. Queried invoices are worse: the customer holds the whole invoice while one or two journeys are argued over, and your office spends hours finding the booking, the driver's record and the timing to answer them.
There is a quieter cost too. Journeys that cannot be proved, such as an unauthorised booking or an unrecorded wait, are often written off to keep the customer happy. That is money for work your drivers really did.
Account billing that checks each job as it happens
What we build keeps each account's rules in one place and applies them from booking to invoice.
- Each account gets a profile: required fields such as PO number, cost centre and passenger name, the list of authorised bookers, the agreed tariff or fixed prices for regular routes, and how the customer wants invoices laid out.
- When a job is booked on an account, the booking screen or web form asks for those fields. If your dispatch system cannot enforce this, our tool checks new account bookings through its API and flags any that are missing details to the controller the same day.
- When a journey completes, it is matched to its booking, and waiting time, extra stops and parking are recorded in the same way whichever driver did the job.
- Jobs that break an account's rules, such as an unknown booker or a fare that does not match the agreed price, go on an exceptions list for the office to sort while the details are fresh.
- At month end, or weekly if the account prefers, invoices are produced with the lines, grouping and references each customer needs, and a spreadsheet backup in their format if they ask for one.
- Invoices and payments are posted to your accounting system, such as Xero or QuickBooks, so you can see what each account owes and chase it.
Month end, most of it done already
By the last day of the month, the account journeys have been checked all month. The office clears a short list of exceptions, not a spreadsheet of hundreds of lines. Invoices go out on time and look the way each customer expects.
When a customer queries a journey, the answer is one search away: who booked it, who travelled, when the car arrived, how long it waited and what was charged. That makes it much easier to hold firm on journeys that are genuinely owed, and to credit the rare one that is not.
A new account is set up once, with its rules, rather than being learnt by trial and error over the first few invoices.
Signs your account billing needs this
- Account invoices go out a week or more after month end.
- Customers reject invoices for missing PO numbers or passenger names.
- Each account's billing rules are known by one person.
- Waiting time is recorded differently by different drivers.
- Disputed journeys get written off because you cannot prove them.