An engineering services firm with 40 people and $8 million in revenue had a cash flow problem that made no sense. They were winning projects, clients were happy, and yet the owner was borrowing to make payroll. The culprit was hiding in the gap between finishing work and actually sending an invoice.
I asked when their invoices were issued. The answer: about 30 days after a project milestone, sometimes 60. One project had $140,000 of finished work sitting unbilled because the project manager could not compile the hours. This is an absurdly common problem, and ERPNext Consulting sees it in almost every services business we walk into.
The fix was not a software change — it was a habit change
We mapped the whole flow: quote, contract, timesheet, milestone approval, invoice. The system was not the bottleneck. The breakdown was that engineers recorded their hours two or three times a week, and the billing person then had to chase project managers for approval.
ERPNext Consulting set up a simple rule: timesheets must be submitted daily, no exceptions. Not weekly, not when the project ends — daily. Project managers got a weekly report showing which engineers were missing entries, and within three weeks the data started arriving on time.
The exact steps we used
Here is the sequence that worked:
- Freeze project scope and milestones in the system before any work begins, so billing has a clear trigger.
- Make timesheet entry a hard daily habit, with the manager’s approval happening the next morning.
- Generate the invoice within five working days of the milestone approval, and track days-unbilled as a real KPI.
The result: unbilled work dropped from $400,000 to $140,000 in four months, and days sales outstanding fell from 58 days to 34 days. For a typical project, the full quote-to-cash cycle now runs about 21 days from signed contract to money in the bank. The owner stopped borrowing for payroll and started funding growth from cash flow. ERPNext Consulting‘s involvement ended with a simple dashboard the office manager updates every Monday.
If you run a services business, do this one check today: list the last five completed milestones and write down today’s date versus the invoice date. If you spot a gap longer than a week, you have already found the money leaking out of your company.