Final Touch Pro · Getting paid
How a cleaning company stopped chasing invoices that were already paid
Impact
ContinuousReceivable updated as the mail arrives29 invoicesAlready paid, found in the first month
4.1 hrs a weekManual invoice and payment reconciliation
“At the beginning of every month we send out all our invoices.”
Alejandro “Leo” Adarve · Director of Operations, Final Touch Pro
- Company
- Final Touch Pro
- Trade
- Commercial cleaning, Toronto
- How they bill
- A month's invoices in one email, extras back-charged at month end
- Who sends them
- From the admin inbox
The money never comes back the way it went out
Final Touch invoices in a batch. Customers issue their own purchase orders, ask for extras through the month, like recleans or a sales clean. Everything is back-charged at month end.
“They send out the POs… we confirm we receive payments for this clean, for this house, and then sometimes they ask us for extra stuff. So by the end of the month we back charge them for the services.”
So a payment arrives under the payer's order number rather than his invoice number. Or as a photograph of a cheque stub. Or as a bank notice with no number on it at all. Matching them up is a job somebody has to sit down and do, and nobody does it every month.
The cost of not doing it is not a missing payment. It is chasing a customer who already paid.
Read every invoice out of his sent mail
Nothing is typed in. The invoices were already going out, and the readers take them from the mail as it is sent.
What runs
- 2,143 invoices read from sent mail, including the months where three PDFs ride in one email under one subject.
- Each PDF is named from its own text, so a batch is three invoices rather than one.
- A payer's own tag in front of our number is recognised as our number.
Cross-reference the payment against what was actually done
Alongside the mail there is a spreadsheet: every property, what it should pay, colour-coded through proposal, in progress, completed, paid and unpaid. Purchase orders and completion notices arrive by email and get checked against it by hand.
“How much was paid, how much are we supposed to get paid, is it correct? Yes, then we check mark it. It’s a lot of cross referencing.”
The failure it exists to catch is quiet. A customer pays and misses one line, on an invoice with dozens.
“Then we have to go, okay, which line item was missed. I have to cross reference everything that was sent out compared to what was received. It’s very annoying, but it’s needed, because there’s so many line items that things get missed on their end.”
And the same work, done twice, produces its own errors. He chased an invoice that had already gone out, because he could not remember whether he had asked for it:
“Did I tell her to invoice it, yes or no? I don’t remember.”
What he wanted was not a report. It was a flag: the job was completed on this date, the purchase order says this, the payment says that, these two values do not match. Reading the documents makes that possible, because all three of those facts arrive as email before they ever reach a spreadsheet.
Match each payment to the invoice it settles
Remittances, bank notices and photographed cheque stubs all get read, and what cannot be matched is held and shown rather than guessed at.
The rule it will not break
- Only a named identifier plus an exact amount posts against an invoice.
- An amount on its own posts only from a remittance advice.
- Anything else is held, named, and put in front of him. Nothing is filed away as settled.
In the first month that surfaced 29 invoices he was still chasing that customers had already paid, and a receivable overstated by $21,289. It holds because it reads every month, not once.
Nothing is typed in, and there is no ledger to keep in step. The documents were already arriving.