When the Aircraft Leaves, the Invoice Should Too

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.

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.

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.