Baseline
A year of shipments, sorted by how long the invoice took to follow.
- 0–1 days36820%
- 2–3 days72340%
- 4–7 days34919%
- 8–14 dayspast a week22513%
- 15–21 dayspast a week734%
- 22 days or morepast a week623%
Ship-to-invoice lag on the 1,800 jobs shipped and invoiced in 2025.
Weighted, because a large job sitting ten days finances more than a small one sitting ten days — and the balance is denominated in dollars, not in jobs.
Where it leaks
None of it is late. It is just not billed yet — and unbilled work is the one balance the aging report does not show.
Work delivered, invoice not yet out. The process carries this balance all year.
A balance sheet shows one date. The figure above it is what the process carries the rest of the year.
Days to get paid counts issued invoices only, so none of this balance is inside it. That is why the two are reported side by side instead of as a share of one — a share would be counting the same dollars twice. Each figure is rounded on its own, so the parts may not add to the last digit.
Before the fix, three things about it that work against us:
Nothing is released today. The balance moves from work you've done to work you've billed — and the cash shows up about one payment cycle later. We say that before the change, not after it.
This assumes your terms start at the invoice. If they start at the ship date, your clock was already running and the picture is different — that's the first thing we'd check on your side.
If you borrow against your receivables, there is one thing that can move today: billed invoices count toward what you can draw and unbilled work usually doesn't. Reading that against your own facility is separate work, and we'd say so before doing it.
The fix
One rule, applied to the same year of shipments.
The shipment releases its own invoice.
- 0–1 days36820%
- 2–3 days72340%
- 4–7 days34919%
- 8–14 dayspast a week22513%
- 15–21 dayspast a week734%
- 22 days or morepast a week623%
Ship-to-invoice lag, 1,800 jobs. Average, weighted by job value: 5.06 days.
identical on both settings
Nothing was created and nothing was collected. The same dollars moved from one balance to the other, and the sum of the two cannot move when that is all that happened. Each figure is rounded on its own, so the parts may not add to the last digit.
Holding it
How you would know it stayed fixed.
3.62–6.49 days
Limits from 12 periods. Beneath: how much it moved from one period to the next.
The rule doesn't get busy and doesn't go on vacation.
Every month sits inside the band, so no month is the problem. This is simply what the process does when it is left alone — which is why the answer is a rule and not a reminder to be quicker.
The average is charted rather than the middle job: the middle job is 3 days in 11 of these 12 months, and a line that flat says more about rounding than about the process. The average moves, and it is the same average the balance above is priced on.
There is no second line here, because there is no "after" yet. The month the rule goes live is where the band gets recomputed — and until the new run is long enough to set its own, it gets measured against this one.
This chart is not free. Every point on it needs a ship date and an invoice date recorded when each happened, rather than reconstructed afterwards from whatever the paperwork says. That instrument is the part most shops do not have, and putting it in is work in the build — not something the rule hands you with it.