Never Miss an Invoice

Billing assurance on Xero

The award went up 4.75% on 1 July. Did your invoices?

I read your Xero file and list every customer you bill on a repeating basis: what each one pays, the month their rate last moved, and what the award has done since. Then I write the letters. It is not a chaser and it never touches an invoice you have already sent. Xero will not give you that list either, and not for want of asking: operators requested the report in April 2022, it carries 266 votes, and Xero still has it marked as not in the pipeline.

You have probably already put this year's rise through payroll in a single pass, because Xero shipped a bulk award update this quarter that does the whole team at once. Nothing does the same thing to the invoices. The cost side of July is now one click and the price side is still somebody remembering.

Which is the asymmetry worth sitting with. A missed invoice can be raised late, and operators do it constantly. A price rise you did not put through in July is gone for every month of this year, and every year after it.

If you are a bookkeeper or accountant reading this because I asked you to check my work: the product is the same one, and everything below is written to the business owner, because the owner is who it is sold to. There is a per-client price for practices and it is deliberately not on this page yet, because I would rather show you three operators already running it than ask you to be the first.

This page is the whole product, including the parts that do not work. You are going to check my claims against a real ledger, so there is no point in me writing any I cannot survive.

Start with the worst result I have

The other half of this reads the same file for work that looks like it was done and never billed. That is the half people expect me to lead with, and it is the half I am not going to sell you on. Here is everything it found on my own company's book.

So what am I actually claiming

Two sentences, and they are the only ones I will defend:

Neither of those is a promise about money, and the difference is the whole reason the pair of them is written down. What the award has done since a rate last moved is arithmetic on a published series. Whether you can actually raise that customer, and what you would collect if you did, is your decision and your agreement, not my forecast.

The first look is a starting position, not news. Everything is trivially new the first time somebody checks. From then on I only write when something moves, and if I have not managed a successful read in a fortnight I say so loudly, because a monitor that has quietly gone blind is the exact failure this thing exists to prevent.

What I check

The register, and the rates on it

This is the half the top of the page is about. Every customer you bill on a repeating basis, what each one is meant to be paying, the month their rate last moved, and whether the agreement gives you a review clause with a notice period you may already be inside. Nine checks run against it, and this list is generated from the one the product runs off:

• Regular work that did not bill when it should have
• Regular work invoiced below what you agreed
• Prices that were meant to move and did not
• Price rises you made that the invoices have not followed
• Regular work where your record and your ledger disagree
• Regular work with no price review clause at all
• Agreements that have ended but are still being invoiced
• Minimum commitments that were not reached
• One-off charges your agreement provides for that were never raised

Now the part I have to be straight about. This leg has only ever run on my own book. Nobody who signed an agreement has ever typed one into it. Every money figure it produces carries its basis on its face, and the modelled ones say so in those words rather than in a footnote. The ledger checks below have at least been graded down to an honest zero on a real file; this half has been graded by nobody. That is the best reason on this page to be sceptical of it, and it is why the review below is graded with you, line by line, against your actual invoices, before I invoice you for it.

The ledger, on its own

Seven checks that need no agreement on file, because most books do not have one. Same rule: generated from the list the reports run off, so it cannot drift from what the product does.

• Recurring invoice templates that stopped running
• Regular customers who went quiet while the work carried on
• Customers invoiced well under their own usual amount
• Quotes that were accepted and never invoiced
• Draft invoices written up and never sent
• Rates that have not moved in years
• Stretches where invoicing stopped and was later caught up in one hit

Two of those rest on a record that exists right now in Xero, a draft that was never sent and an accepted quote that was never invoiced. I call that money evidenced. The rest are derived from your own billing history, and I call that modelled. The two never blend, in the report or in the email. A headline figure only ever quotes evidenced money, and every modelled figure carries the working that produced it.

Rates that have not moved in years are reported separately again, as an opportunity rather than a leak. Nobody owes you that money. It is a decision, not a debt, and it is kept out of both recovery figures.

Every amount is ex GST, taken from the invoice subtotal. Reading the total on a GST-inclusive invoice would overstate every finding by ten per cent.

What it cannot see

These are limits, not a roadmap. If one of them matters to you, this is not the right tool for your book yet.

The detectors are deliberately built to under-report. One wrong "they forgot to invoice this" teaches an owner to ignore every alert afterwards, so irregular billers are never called silent, voided and deleted invoices never enter a billing history, and anything under the noise floor is left alone.

What I can reach in the file

What it costs

That table is one year of one rise. It is not a forecast of what you will collect, and I am not claiming anybody owes it to you. Whether you can raise a given customer, and how much notice you owe first, is a question about your agreement rather than about the award. That is the part this reads your file for. There is no job-management tier and there will not be one advertised until that half actually ships.

How a review actually runs

You click the Xero connect screen on your own machine, so you see the four read-only scopes with your own eyes. I never connect anything on your behalf, nothing writes back to Xero, and you disconnect it yourself without emailing me.

Then we grade it together, line by line, against your actual invoices. Every row that says a rate has never moved gets checked in your file while we are both looking at it. If a row is wrong, that is the result: I write it down as wrong, I do not argue with you about it, and I do not fix it on the call. If any row is wrong, I do not invoice you. That is the bar I have set and it is the only one that means anything, because precision is the whole product.

A review that finds nothing is a real result and you will hear it from me as one. If your rates are all current and nothing has stopped, you get that in writing rather than a manufactured number, and my own book is the reason I can say that with a straight face. The recovery half of this returned exactly zero on it.

Your data comes back out as easily as it went in, and you can watch every read I make while it is in there.

Check one customer first, no login

Or reply to the email that brought you here and ask me anything on this page. brad@boltonops.com