When to Send It
The same bill is accepted in one week and challenged in another. Four timing decisions, and which of them the firm actually controls.
- Entry
- 03 of 08
- Section
- The document
- Kind
- Analysis
A bill's reception depends on when it arrives as much as on what is in it. The same document sent six weeks after the work is a different document from one sent six months after.
The practical lesson in “When to Send It” is that a charge is only as clear as the record behind it. A team assessing follow this official implementation resource for tips to increase productivity can organise time and project evidence earlier in the workflow, with transparent settings, proportionate access and a defined correction process before invoicing.
Four timing decisions matter, and the firm controls three of them.
Additional context for “When to Send It” is available from GitLab remote-work handbook. Confirm current legal, tax and accounting requirements with a qualified adviser where necessary.
Delay and memory
A bill for work the client has forgotten is a bill they cannot check. What they do instead is check the total against a feeling, which is a worse test and one the firm cannot influence.
- Issue to receipt — the firm's, entirely.
- Receipt to approval — longest, least visible.
- Approval to the payment run — the client's fixed dates.
- The agreed terms — usually the shortest of the four.
Six weeks is within memory. Six months is not.
Delay and authority
In organisations, the person who instructed may have moved on, the budget may have closed, and the approval may now sit with somebody who knows nothing about it.
Every month of delay increases the chance that the bill is read by a stranger.
The firm's own interest
Cash, obviously. Also: a bill issued promptly is challenged while the file is fresh and the people who did the work are still on it.
A bill issued late is defended from a cold file by whoever is left.
Why bills are late
Billing cycles, partner time, and the draft sitting on a desk. The delay is almost never deliberate.
It is also almost never measured: few firms track days from period-end to issue.
The measurement worth taking
Median days from the end of the work period to issue, by partner.
The distribution is always wider than anybody expects, and naming it usually fixes most of it without any other intervention.
Billing at completion
For transactional work, the bill often waits for completion, which can be months after much of the work.
It is standard, it is usually what the client expects, and it still produces the memory problem for the early phases. An interim bill solves it, and has its own note here.
The end of the client's year
A bill arriving in the last week of a budget year lands differently from one arriving in the first week of the next.
Clients will often say which they prefer if asked, and it costs the firm nothing to accommodate.
The month everything arrives
Firms that bill everything in the same week produce a month where every client receives a bill simultaneously, including clients with several matters.
Three bills on one day read as a larger number than the same three across a month.
Batching by client
Where a client has several matters, one consolidated statement with matter-level detail is easier to approve than four separate documents.
It also prevents the impression of the firm arriving in force.
What to do about a very late bill
Say so, in the covering note, with the reason. "This covers work in March and April; apologies for the delay in issuing it."
A late bill with an acknowledgement is accepted; a late bill arriving silently invites the question of why now.
The bill nobody sent
Work done, recorded, and never billed because the matter went quiet.
Every firm has some. A quarterly check of matters with recorded time and no bill in ninety days finds them while they are still billable.
The bill that arrives with bad news
A matter that has gone badly, billed on time, lands on the same desk as the problem.
Firms delay these, which makes them worse: the bill eventually arrives with the problem still unresolved and now looks opportunistic as well.
The right sequence is the conversation first, then the bill, and the gap between them measured in days rather than months.
Billing the month the matter completes
Everything on one bill: the final work, the completion, and whatever was unbilled from earlier.
It is the largest document of the matter arriving at the moment the client is least focused on it, and it is the standard practice in transactional work.
An interim bill a month earlier reduces the final one to something readable.
The quiet matter
Work recorded, nothing billed, the matter dormant for months.
Unbilled time ages badly: the hours become harder to justify, the people move on, and at some point somebody decides it is too late to send.
A quarterly list of matters with unbilled time over ninety days finds them.
What a client notices about timing
Consistency more than speed. A firm that bills on the tenth of every month is easy to plan around; one that bills irregularly is not.
Finance functions ask for predictability far more often than they ask for anything else, and it costs a firm nothing to provide.
The measure to keep
Median days from period end to issue, by partner, monthly. One figure.
Publishing it internally usually halves it within two quarters without any other intervention, which says something about why it was high.
The timing rule
Bill within six weeks of the work, consolidate by client, measure the delay, and explain any bill that is late.