Invoice the day the work is done, not three weeks later

The job is finished, the customer is happy, the crew has already moved on. The invoice goes out two or three weeks later, once the hours have come in, the job sheet has come back from the van, and someone has found a Friday to deal with it.

The short answer: every day between the end of the work and the invoice is one more day before you get paid. The useful answer means measuring that delay in your own business, then seeing where it gets lost.

What the rule says, and why it matters for your cash#

In France, between businesses, an invoice should in principle be issued when the goods are delivered or the service is performed. When you carry out several separate services for the same customer within a month, a summary invoice can go out at the latest at the end of the month, in the cases allowed by VAT rules.

The second point is even more concrete. The payment term agreed with your customer, say 60 days, generally runs from the invoice date. If the invoice goes out 18 days late, you are paid 18 days later. Your customer has nothing to do with it: you stretched the term yourself.

Measure your invoicing delay in an hour#

Nobody knows this number, because no tool calculates it. Yet it is simple to measure.

1. Take your last twenty job or service invoices.
2. For each one, note the date the work ended: the handover report, the signed job sheet, or the last day hours were logged on the job.
3. Note the invoice date.
4. Work out the gap in days, then take the median: the middle value once the gaps are sorted from shortest to longest.
5. Look at the three latest invoices, and ask what held them back.

The median matters more than the average: one invoice stuck for two months by a dispute says nothing about how you usually work.

The five places where days get lost#

Extra work deserves a word of its own. When it isn't written down, the invoice waits for an answer nobody asks for, or goes out without it. Either way you lose: time or margin.

When I go on holiday, I'm still the one handling all the paperwork.

If invoicing depends on one person, it stops when that person stops. That isn't a lack of discipline, it's an organisation with no backup.

The calculation on an example#

Take a plumbing and heating business of 15 people that invoices €150,000 a month, roughly €5,000 a day. Its median invoicing delay is 18 days. The figures are assumptions.

The calculation: €5,000 a day, multiplied by the number of days of delay. That €75,000 is not a yearly gain: it is recovered once, then stays available as long as the delay stays short. It is money that is already yours, sitting idle between the end of the job and the invoice.

It connects to the rest of the cycle: a late invoice often goes with a margin you only learn about afterwards, and the same lack of follow-up as quotes nobody chases.

What changes with an application built for the business#

When quotes, scheduling, time tracking and handover live in the same application, the invoice has nothing left to wait for.

• The team leader gets the handover report or job sheet signed on their phone: the job switches to "finished" that same day.
• Logged hours and approved extra work are already attached to the job.
• The invoice is prepared automatically from the signed quote and whatever was added. All that is left is to check it and send it.
• Every morning, a list shows the jobs that are finished but not yet invoiced, with the number of days elapsed.

The invoicing delay becomes a number you can see, not a feeling. The details are on the invoicing and collection page.

Invoicing delay: the key takeaways#

The invoice should go out when the work is done, and the payment term runs from its date. Every day of delay is a day of cash you lend your customer without knowing it.

Measure your delay on your last twenty invoices, find where the days are lost, and deal first with the job sheet and the extra work. That is where most of the days are won.