Contractor Finance Glossary
What is Billing Speed (Days to Invoice)?
Also called: days to invoice, time to bill
Billing speed is the number of days between finishing work and sending the invoice, and it is the first and cheapest lever a contractor has on cash flow.
Cash cannot arrive until the invoice goes out. Every day a completed job sits unbilled is a day of free financing you are handing the customer, and it happens quietly because the work is done and everyone has moved on to the next job. Billing speed makes that delay visible.
The fix is almost always process, not effort. Jobs get invoiced fast when closeout, cost coding, and billing sit in one workflow instead of waiting on a monthly batch. Speeding up the front of the cash cycle shortens collections without a single awkward payment call.
How it is calculated
Billing speed = average number of days between job completion (or the last cost posting) and invoice issue date, measured across jobs in the period. The Level benchmark dataset puts the median at 1 day, so anything measured in weeks is a process problem, not a norm.
Related reading
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