The clock starts at the invoice, not the job
Most businesses think about getting paid in terms of customers who pay late. Fewer measure the delay that happens before the customer is involved at all.
Payment terms usually run from the invoice date. Where no terms are agreed, the UK’s late payment legislation sets a default of 30 days from the later of the work being done or the customer receiving notice of the amount owed. Either way, the customer’s clock does not start while the invoice sits in your office.
Finish a job on 2 October, invoice it on 14 October on 30-day terms, and the money is due on 13 November: 42 days after the work was complete. Those 12 days are credit you gave the customer without deciding to. Across every job you finish in a month, they add up to a sum of money you are funding yourself.
Why the company behind QuickBooks just bought a billing business
On 15 October Intuit, which makes QuickBooks, announced an agreement to acquire Sequence, a revenue management company founded in 2021 and based in London and New York. Sequence covers the stretch between agreeing a price and collecting it: contract terms, pricing, billing, invoicing and collections, including bills tied to usage or project milestones. Terms were not disclosed and no completion date was announced.
The deal is aimed at Intuit’s mid-market products, Intuit Enterprise Suite and QuickBooks Online Advanced, and Intuit says an integrated offering will follow in the coming months. Nothing changes for an ordinary QuickBooks subscription this week, and we would not advise anyone to change software because of it.
The useful part is what the purchase says. One of the largest accounting software companies has decided that the work before an invoice exists is a problem worth buying a company to solve. For an owner-managed business, that work is usually done by someone chasing information.
Follow one finished job
Take a fictional electrical contractor fitting out an office for £14,600. The quote sets out a 30% deposit, 40% at first fix and the balance on completion. Halfway through, the client asks for four extra external lights. The site supervisor agrees £640 by WhatsApp and gets on with it.
The job finishes on a Friday. Here is what happens next:
- The signed completion sheet stays in the supervisor’s van until their next visit to the office.
- Accounts can see the quote, but not the extra lights.
- Accounts are not sure whether the first-fix stage was invoiced in full, so they hold the final invoice and ask.
- The supervisor is on another site and replies on Wednesday.
Nobody did anything wrong. Each person had part of the information and no single record brought it together. The likely outcomes are a late invoice, an invoice for the original figure with the £640 forgotten, or a corrected invoice that makes the customer wonder what else was missed.
If you have read our piece on when a spreadsheet stops coping, the pattern is the same. The fault is not in the job or the accounts package. It sits in the handover between them.
What “ready to invoice” actually needs
Make “ready to invoice” a stage that a job or milestone reaches, with the same status in the job record and in accounts. To reach it, five things need to be true:
- The price is settled, changes included. The quote, plus every approved change, each with its amount, who approved it and where (an email, a signed variation or a note against the job). A WhatsApp agreement counts once it is recorded against the job, not while it stays on one phone.
- The right stage is complete. For staged work that means the milestone, not the whole job. A named person confirms it, with a date.
- The evidence is attached. The completion sheet, delivery note, photos or sign-off, attached to the record rather than in a van.
- Earlier invoices are accounted for. What has already been billed against this job, so the next invoice is the difference and not a guess.
- Any open query is named. If something is blocking the invoice, it appears as a query with an owner, not as silence. “Waiting for Dave to confirm the cable run” can be chased. “Not done yet” cannot.
Once those are in place, someone authorised reviews the record and approves the invoice. Usually that takes a minute, because the information has already been gathered.
Where AI helps, and where a simple rule is better
Most of this needs no AI at all. “When the supervisor marks the first-fix stage complete, add it to the ready-to-invoice list” is a rule, and ordinary software follows rules reliably.
AI earns its place with untidy information. It can read the client’s message, spot that four lights at £640 were agreed, and add a proposed change to the job: +£640, external lighting, from the client’s message of 14 October. A person accepts or rejects it. Until they do, it shows as an open query and the final invoice cannot be raised.
The AI suggests, a person approves the amount and the record shows where each figure came from. Our AI workflow checklist covers the checks to do before letting any automation near money.
Check five finished jobs this week
Pick the five most recent jobs, or stages, that are finished but not yet invoiced. Ten minutes and the job files are enough. For each one, write down:
Job or stage: Customer and job reference.
Completed: The date the work was actually finished.
Invoiced: The date the invoice went out, or “not yet”.
Days waiting: The gap between the two.
Waiting for: The specific missing piece: a figure, a signature, a confirmation.
Who had it: The person who could have supplied it on the day.
Two things come out of this. First, a number to track: average days from completion to invoice. Second, a pattern. If three of the five were waiting for the same kind of thing, such as variations or sign-off sheets, you have found the one handover to fix, and you can measure whether the fix worked.
You may not need new software
The problem usually sits before the accounting package, so replacing the accounting package rarely fixes it. Sometimes a rule that variations go into the job record the same day, and a completion photo sent from site, are enough. Sometimes your existing job software and accounts can already be connected and nobody has switched it on.
Where jobs, stages and changes live across spreadsheets, paper and phones, a system that holds the job from quote to invoice pays for itself in recovered extras and shorter waits for money. That is the kind of thing we build. Run the five-job check first. It will tell you which situation you are in.
Inferred is based in Horsham and builds business systems and field service software for owner-managed businesses across Sussex, Surrey and the wider South East. Bring us your five jobs and we will tell you honestly whether the fix is software, a process change or nothing at all.
See how we build business systems →
Sources and scope
- FinTech Futures and CFO Dive on Intuit’s announcement of 15 October 2026: Sequence’s scope, the products concerned and the absence of disclosed terms or a closing date. Reports of a deal value are unconfirmed and are not repeated here.
- Late Payment of Commercial Debts (Interest) Act 1998, section 4: the default 30-day period where no payment terms are agreed. This is a summary, not legal advice; agreed contract terms take precedence.
The electrical contractor, the figures and the dates are a fictional illustration, not an Inferred customer. Inferred has no connection with Intuit or Sequence.