Start with one number. On a typical day, a 35-person metal fabricator had $2.4 million of finished work that had been delivered but not yet invoiced. Not unpaid. Not even billed.
The owner was convinced his customers were slow payers. His average collection time was 61 days, and he blamed the market. So during an ERPNext Consulting review, we followed 40 jobs from delivery signature to invoice date, one by one, by hand.
The average delay was 18 days, and every one of those days belonged to him, not to the customer.
Where the 18 days actually hide
The causes were almost embarrassingly ordinary. Not one of them was about customers being difficult.
- Signed delivery tickets sat in the truck cab until Friday, then in a folder until someone had time to type them in.
- One line item was in dispute — a 12-foot section instead of 10 — so the entire $46,000 invoice waited on a phone call that took four days to return.
- The office waited for the shop to confirm extra hours on a change order, and the shop had already moved to the next job.
- Missing customer order numbers meant invoices bounced back for correction and were re-dated, pushing them another week.
- Anything delivered in the last four days of the month simply waited for the month-end batch.
The rule that removed most of the delay
We replaced “invoice when the job is finished” with “invoice what shipped today, today.” Undisputed lines go out immediately. Disputed lines get pulled onto a separate short invoice with a named owner and a 48-hour clock.
Partial invoicing sounds like more paperwork. It isn’t. The fabricator went from 260 invoices a month to 340, the average invoice value barely moved, and the cash arrived two and a half weeks earlier.
Two supporting changes made it stick. Delivery tickets got photographed and uploaded from the truck at the moment of signature. And the person handling the dispute queue was measured on one thing: how many disputed lines were older than 48 hours. That number was 31 in week one and stayed under 5 after that.
What it was worth in cash
Collection time fell from 61 days to 44 over five months. On $14 million of annual revenue, 17 days equals roughly $650,000 of cash that stopped being tied up in work already delivered.
- Week 1: pick the single largest unpaid delivered job and invoice it today, even if one line is disputed.
- Week 2: set a rule that no delivery ticket stays in a vehicle overnight.
- Week 3: name one person who owns the dispute list and give them a 48-hour target and a visible daily count.
If you take one thing from this, take the order of operations. Fixing your own billing delay is far easier than chasing customers, and it pays the same day it is fixed.