Completed work that never reaches the billing queue

What it looks like

The job is done. The crew has left, the sheet has come in, and somebody in the office has entered the hours and closed the job out. On the screen it says complete.

Invoicing is a separate step. It is often done later, by a different person, in a batch on a set day, working from a list of what is ready to bill. Complete and ready to bill are not the same thing, and something has to move a job from one to the other. Often that something is a person remembering to do it.

A job that was never moved does not look wrong. It looks finished.

What it costs

The missing job leaves no trace where anyone would look. An unpaid invoice shows up on the list of what customers owe, and somebody chases it. A job that was never invoiced is not on that list, because there is nothing to chase. It will not appear on any list of unpaid invoices.

Time works against collecting it. An invoice that goes out the week of the job arrives while the work is still fresh. The customer saw the crew and the work is in front of them. The same invoice months later arrives with no context. If the customer questions it, the office is less able to answer, because the crew has been through many jobs since. Some of these end up never billed at all. The work was not in doubt, but nobody can show it cleanly any more.

It is usually found by accident. Somebody reviewing a job's cost, a customer calling about something else, a year-end check. A review can only count the ones that surface.

Where it goes wrong

• Complete and invoiced live in different places. Or in the same system with a manual step between them. Either way, the connection is a person.
• The handoff is a habit. It works while the same person does it every week. It breaks during a vacation, a busy month, or a change of staff.
• Jobs held on purpose look like jobs forgotten. Some finished work should wait: a sign-off is pending, it is warranty work, it is being billed with a later phase. With no reason written down, a real miss hides among them.
• Nobody owns the gap. The field assumes the office bills it. The office bills what it is handed.

What a better version looks like

On a regular schedule, every job marked complete is checked against the invoices. Anything complete with no invoice lands on a short list with the job record attached. A job held on purpose carries its reason, so the list shows only the ones nobody has explained.

The check creates no invoices and changes no records. It makes the absence visible, which is the one thing the invoice list cannot do.

Questions worth asking about your own operation

• What moves a job from complete to ready to bill?
• How would you find a finished job that was never invoiced?
• When a job is held on purpose, is the reason written down?
• Who would notice if the person who does the handoff was out for a month?