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From completed jobs to cashed cheques: fixing the job-to-invoice process in FM
How FM service providers can streamline the job-to-invoice process and get paid sooner
Does this sound familiar?
Your engineers are flat out. Planned maintenance is getting done, reactive calls are covered, and your teams are bouncing between sites keeping buildings running. On paper, things are ticking over nicely, and your contracts look healthy.
But the pile of unbilled work keeps growing.
Jobs are still sitting as “awaiting info”. A remedial visit is missing photos. A PPM visit needs a certificate attached. Extra works agreed on site haven’t been turned into a priced variation. Approvals for larger jobs are stuck in inboxes. Your finance team is chasing engineers and contract managers for notes, timesheets, PO numbers and evidence just to work out what’s actually billable. By the time an invoice finally goes out, the work was done weeks ago, sometimes across dozens of buildings.
The only “good” news is that it isn’t just you. Late payments have become endemic across UK businesses – most companies are being paid well beyond their agreed terms, often by more than a month. So as an FM provider, your cash is under pressure before your invoice even lands.
You can’t control your client’s payment run or their internal approval chain. But you can control how fast and how cleanly you turn “job done” into “invoice out” across your sites.
That’s what this article is about. We’ll look at where that unbilled work – your work in progress (WIP) – really builds up in FM service delivery, what a clean job-to-invoice flow looks like for multi-site contracts, and how other service providers are using Joblogic to move from “job done” to “cash in” with a lot less friction.
Common pain points in a manual job-to-invoice process
The basic idea of the job-to-invoice process in FM is simple: your teams complete the visit, you capture the evidence, you raise the invoice. It only becomes difficult when that flow runs on scraps of paper and independent systems that don’t communicate.
For most FM service providers, the same issues keep showing up: :
- Incomplete job information. Jobs are logged and completed, but time, parts, assets, and clear outcomes are missing, so invoicing teams can’t bill with confidence – especially on multi-site PPM runs where an engineer might complete five or six visits before they’re back at a desk.
- Lost variations and extra works. “While you’re here” jobs and verbal approvals aren’t captured properly, so chargeable work never makes it into the job-to-invoice flow, particularly on reactive callouts where the engineer has no easy way to log an extra task on the spot.
- Approvals scattered across inboxes. Quotes and variations are agreed in email chains, calls, and messages, making it hard to prove what was signed off when it’s time to invoice.
- Proof of work all over the place. Photos, signatures, and certificates are stored on phones, paper, and shared drives instead of being attached to the job record.
- Finance rekeying data into accounts. Job information is typed again into Sage, Xero, Exchequer, etc., adding delays, admin, and invoicing errors.
- No clear view of done vs invoiced. There’s no single, real-time view of what’s been completed, what’s been invoiced, and what’s stuck in WIP.
Those six issues, whether they show up on their own or all at once, are the main reasons your cash flow stagnates. There’s no mysterious force at work – just simple missteps that create a knock-on effect everyone feels. From jobs being recorded poorly on site to an email approval sitting unanswered in someone’s inbox, it all links back to one thing: slowing your cash down.
The important thing is that none of this is about people not doing their jobs. It’s about a job-to-invoice process that relies on memory, manual steps, and scattered systems. Engineers shouldn’t have to remember what happened at 3pm last Thursday – the system should. A process with so many failure points is guaranteed to hit you at some point – it’s not a question of if, but when. Fix the process, and suddenly the same engineers, the same finance team, and the same contracts can turn completed jobs into clean, timely invoices far more reliably.
What a clean FM job-to-invoice process looks like in practice
An AHU is flagged as faulty. The job is logged against the right contract, site, and asset, with agreed rates and charge rules already there. The engineer begins their journey with everything accessible from their device: site details, asset history, and any notes.
On site, they update the job as they work. Time, parts, and notes are recorded against the job, not on a scrap of paper. They take photos of the fault and the fix, capture any readings, and get the client’s signature before they leave. By the time they drive away, the job record is complete, and the office can see it in real time.
The client asks them to pick up an extra task while they are there. Instead of hoping someone remembers it later, the engineer adds a variation from the same screen. The system applies the correct rates, and, if needed, a quick quote goes out and comes back approved. The original job, the extra work, and the price for both are now linked together.
Back in the office, the team has already been updated with the engineer’s work. They can see the time, parts, photos, signature, and approvals in one place, mark the job as ready, and raise the invoice straight from the job record into Sage, Xero, or Exchequer.
In that kind of flow, “job done” and “ready to invoice” sit much closer together. The same engineers and office team are working in a process that captures everything as the work happens, not days later from memory, so far less of your FM work ends up stuck in WIP instead of in your bank account.
Five ways to keep your FM job-to-invoice process on track
Rightly, a lot of FM cash flow chat is focused on late payments, but that isn’t the whole picture. A Forbes piece on facilities management and cash flow points out that many problems start inside the operation – in slow, manual processes between work completed and invoices raised. RICS guidance on procuring FM services pushes in the same direction, stressing clear payment mechanisms and reliable operational data.
You cannot control exactly when every client pays, but you can control how tight your job-to-invoice process is, so that is where you win back control.
The foundations of a working job-to-invoice process in FM rely on getting a few basics right:
- Capture the job properly at the start.
Raise jobs against the correct contract, site, and asset, with agreed rates and charge rules applied from the beginning. - Make it easy for engineers to record everything on site.
Give them one place to log time, parts, notes, photos, readings, and signatures as they work, not days later from memory. - Treat variations as part of the workflow, not an afterthought.
Let engineers add extra tasks and variations from the same screen, at the right rates, with a simple approval path. - Keep approvals and proof of work with the job.
Store quotes, “go-ahead” replies, photos, certificates, and signatures against the job record so finance is not trawling through inboxes. - Generate invoices from job data, not from scratch. Build invoices from the job record and push them into Sage, Xero, or Exchequer, so finance is checking and posting, not retyping and fixing errors.
Consistently hitting these five points lets you lock down your part of the cash flow equation.
A weekly billing rhythm for multi-site FM contracts
Month-end invoicing is how WIP quietly gets out of hand. A weekly rhythm keeps work, cash, and reporting much closer together.- Daily: engineers close jobs with full notes, time, and proof of work.
- Mid-week: ops and finance review WIP and clear any gaps.
- End of week: invoice-ready jobs are batched and pushed into Sage, Xero, or Exchequer.
Run that cycle consistently and completed work stops piling up for weeks. It will not fix every late payer, but it does tighten your side of the cash flow equation.
Getting and keeping your FM job-to-invoice process under control
If you recognise the problems in this article, you already know where the gaps are. The next step is simply to act on them. We can help you turn the job-to-invoice process from an ongoing worry into something designed, visible, and reliable so “job done” feels much closer to “cash in” and WIP stops quietly keeping you up at night.
Talk to us about your job-to-invoice process and we will show you where Joblogic can remove friction and get cash in sooner.
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