Time to invoice
Time to invoice is how long a completed job sits before it's billed — the lag between work order completion and the invoice date — and it's the controllable half of the cash collection cycle.
The inputs.
- Invoice dateWhen the invoice is issued — the end of the clock on a completed job.
- Completion dateWhen the work order closed, so the lag between closed and billed is explicit.
- Why it mattersIt's the controllable half of the collection cycle — shortening it moves days sales outstanding down without changing customer payment behavior.
What to know.
How to calculate time to invoice
Time to invoice equals the invoice date minus the work order completion date, averaged across the jobs billed in a period. It's measured in days, and it's best read as a trend — if the average creeps from one day to five, that's a process slowing down, not seasonality. For agreement billing that runs on a fixed cadence, the metric is less relevant; it's built for time-and-materials and project work where each job produces its own invoice.
Why time to invoice matters for commercial contractors
A completed job is revenue already earned but not yet collectible — and while it sits unbilled it does nothing for cash flow. Time to invoice is the controllable half of the collection cycle because shortening it moves days sales outstanding down without changing anything about how fast your customers actually pay. On a book that carries meaningful time-and-materials work, a few days of billing lag is real working capital sitting in a drawer.
What drives time to invoice up
The usual bottlenecks are manual invoicing from paper work orders, waiting on technician job notes, photos, or signatures, waiting on parts pricing or labor codes before an invoice can be built, and batching invoices to month-end instead of billing as jobs close. Every step that requires someone to re-enter or chase data after the job is done adds a day to the lag — which is why field-captured data at job close is the fix.
How Thermal shortens time to invoice
Thermal captures labor, parts, notes, and photos as part of the work order itself, so the invoice is generated from the job record rather than rebuilt from paper after the fact — and job costing keeps the cost attached to the same record. Invoice date and completion date are both on the record, so time to invoice rolls up per branch without a separate spreadsheet. QuickBooks Online sync is in early access; the Sage Intacct and Business Central adapters are on the roadmap.
Questions attached to this term.
How does time to invoice affect DSO?
DSO is outstanding receivables against billed revenue — the longer a completed job sits unbilled, the longer it sits uncollected. Cutting time to invoice pulls DSO down without asking a single customer to pay faster.
What's a good time to invoice target?
For time-and-materials work, billing the same day or the next business day after the job closes is a reasonable bar — but the right answer is your own trend against your baseline, not a universal number.
Does time to invoice matter for agreement billing?
Less so — agreement revenue bills on a fixed cadence regardless of individual jobs. The metric is most meaningful where every job produces its own invoice, which is time-and-materials and project work.
Who owns time to invoice?
Usually the office or operations team, but the fix is upstream — the field data captured at job close. If the work order is complete and priced, invoicing is a quick step; if the field record is thin, the office is the bottleneck.
These numbers, on your own book.
If you want to see them calculated from real work orders and agreements rather than a spreadsheet, that's a demo.