
When the Aircraft Leaves, the Invoice Should Too
How Billing Delays Drain Cash, Disrupt Growth, and Burn Out Your Team
TABLE OF CONTENTS
The Problem: Delayed Invoices, Delayed Cash
In an ideal world, every aircraft leaves your hangar with two things in hand: a completed logbook entry and a ready-to-send invoice. But for most MRO shops, that’s not the reality.
Invoices are often delayed by days, sometimes weeks, after work is complete. Logbook entries lag as techs race to meet deadlines. And in the meantime, your shop is floating the cost of labor, parts, and overhead—without getting paid.


The Financial Impact
Delayed invoices don’t just affect your books—they impact your ability to grow, hire, and invest:
- Cash Flow Gaps: While you’re funding the job upfront, you’re waiting 30, 45, even 60+ days to collect.
- Ballooning A/R: Each day of delay increases the size of your receivables and the chance of customer payment issues.
- Lost Early Pay Discounts: Slower cash-in delays your own ability to take advantage of supplier discounts.
- Cost of Capital*: At 9% borrowing rates, a 15-day delay on $1M in annual revenue can cost you $3,700 in interest.
What That Really Means for Your Business
Let’s say you finish a job on July 1st. But the invoice doesn’t go out until July 14th, and the customer doesn’t pay until August 15th.
That’s 45 days of delayed cash.
In that time, you’ve already paid your:
- Technicians
- Vendors (parts and supplies)
- Overhead (utilities, insurance, rent)
You’re effectively acting like a bank—fronting the cost of the job without repayment.
Now multiply that across 10–20 work orders per month, and you may be floating hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid work. That ties up working capital you could use for:
- Hiring another technician
- Stocking fast-moving parts
- Buying equipment
Why Cost of Capital Matters & What's At Stake
Many MROs bridge the gap by drawing from a line of credit. Here’s a real-world scenario:
- You use a $200,000 line of credit to cover payroll and vendor bills while waiting on invoice payments.
- The interest rate is 9% APR.
- You carry that balance for 30 days.
That single month costs $1,500 in interest—and if that happens consistently, you’re paying tens of thousands a year just to keep up.
It also creates risk: if your receivables stretch longer, or a key customer delays payment, you’re at the mercy of the bank’s terms—not your own timeline.
Meanwhile, competitors who bill same-day are reinvesting faster, hiring smarter, and offering better terms to win new customers.
Without addressing the delays:
- Admins turn into full-time collectors
- Delays and cash flow issues compound over time
- Owners misdiagnose the problem as customer delinquency
- You lose valuable time that could be spent quoting or servicing the next aircraft
- Your competitors who bill same-day win the next deal
Uncovering the Root Cause of Invoicing Delays
Delays don’t start at the invoice—they begin long before:
- Manual Part Fulfillment: Every out-of-stock part requires extra steps to update pricing and availability.
- Lagging Labor Capture: Paper time cards, after‑the‑fact spreadsheets, even stand‑alone punch‑buttons that aren’t synced to the work order all push labor costs to the rear‑view mirror—so invoices follow weeks behind.
- Disconnected Quote-to-Invoice Flow: Without standard verbiage or templates, work orders require rework to invoice.
- Logbook Formatting by Hand: Entries aren’t finalized until hours (or days) later.
- Manual or Cumbersome Transfer to Accounting Systems: Entering or integrating invoice data into platforms like QuickBooks takes additional time, adding hours of administrative work each week.
Each of these adds friction—and days—to the billing process.
Real-World Story: From Backlog to Same-Day Billing
Andy Yanka, VP of Aircraft Services at Moyer Aviation, faced these same issues. Disconnected systems, turnover, and spreadsheet-based processes caused delays across his operation. But by assessing their workflow, identifying root causes, and rolling out EBIS in stages, Andy’s team cut through the chaos:
“You’re probably doing the work of three people just to keep up with admin if you don’t have the right systems in place.” — Andy Yanka on the Return to Service Podcast
They didn’t just improve billing speed—they improved technician productivity, reduced rework, and made life easier for the back office.

Spotting the Issues
Ask yourself:
- How many calendar days from work order close to cash received?
- What’s the total $ amount of receivables aged over 30 days?
- How many invoices need to be reworked before customers will pay?
If you don’t like the answers… it’s time to look deeper.
Start With a Diagnostic
We’ve created a 15-minute Maintenance Efficiency Assessment that can help you uncover hidden delays in your billing workflow. It covers work order processing, labor, parts, compliance, and handoff to finance.
Then, book a whiteboard session with our team. We’ll walk through the areas costing you the most time and show how EBIS customers are solving these issues today.
Let’s turn every work order into revenue—without the wait.

Looking to explore a new aircraft maintenance management system?
Schedule some time with one of our experts.