For shops still running dispatch and billing by hand

How much of your own money are you financing right now?

Work finished, not yet billed. Six questions, about sixty seconds. You see your number before we ask for anything. No email, no call, no form in the way.

Hours a week your team spends on manual dispatch, chasing paperwork, and matching invoices to job tickets 25

Across everyone who touches it: dispatcher, office manager, whoever ends up fixing it.

Fully loaded hourly cost of that back-office staff $31

Default is an estimate, not your number. BLS median for Dispatchers, May 2025 is $50,340/yr ≈ $24.20/hr, times a 1.3× loaded multiplier for payroll tax, benefits, and overhead. Drag it to what you actually pay.

Invoices you send in a typical month 400

Share of those invoices that need a correction or get disputed 8%

Default is conservative on purpose. Industry data puts errors in roughly 39% of invoices, but most are caught before they cost anything. This asks only about the ones somebody has to go back and fix.

Days between finishing a job and the invoice going out 7

Average invoice amount $1,200

ReadoutEst.

Work finished and not yet billed

A balance, not an annual loss. It's your money, parked in work you have already done, before the payment clock has even started.

At 2 days instead of 7, you would carry$0 less

This does not make anyone pay faster. Your terms are your terms. It starts the same clock earlier on every job, so in steady state there is this much less of your own cash sitting in finished work waiting to be invoiced. Whatever your terms are, they run from the invoice date, not the day the tech left.

And separately, per yearFlow

Time spent coordinating by hand$0

Invoice corrections$0

Annual operating cost$0

Kept separate from the balance above on purpose. A yearly flow and a point-in-time balance are different units, and adding them together would inflate the number.

If you want the real number instead of an estimate

Everything above runs on ranges you set yourself, so treat it as a rough cut. Your actual figure is already sitting in ServiceTitan or Housecall Pro, in the Invoices report: completion date against invoice date. Most shops have never pulled it.

The Invoice Lag Readout: a 30 to 45 minute screen share where you drive. You open your own invoicing report, I show you exactly which two columns to pull, and we work out your real days-to-invoice and what it’s tying up. Nothing gets exported and nothing leaves your building. You get a one page write-up of your own numbers afterward.

Free, and I’m doing five of them. All I ask in return is twenty honest minutes afterward telling me what was useful and what wasn’t, so I can point the next one better.

Grab one of the five

Brandon Schmidt, ProtoPath Systems. River Falls, Wisconsin. You can reach me directly at bschmidt@protopathsystems.com.

How this is calculated

Work finished and not yet billed (the headline): (invoices/month × average invoice ÷ 30) × days to invoice. Every value is yours. This is a working-capital balance: revenue you have earned but not yet billed at any given moment. It measures the invoicing lag only. Whatever your customers then take to pay is a separate balance on top of this one, and this page does not attempt to estimate it, so treat the figure as a floor rather than your full cash conversion cycle. It is also deliberately kept out of the annual figure below, because a balance and a yearly flow are different units and adding them together would inflate the number.
What invoicing in 2 days changes: The same formula run at 2 days instead of yours, subtracted from the figure above. It is not new revenue, it is not a saving, and it does not make a customer pay faster. Your payment terms are whatever they are, and they run from the invoice date rather than from the day the job closed. Invoicing sooner starts that clock sooner on every job, so in steady state you are financing less of your own completed work at any given moment. The benefit is a smaller balance carried permanently, not a cheque arriving.
Time spent coordinating by hand: hours/week × loaded hourly cost × 52. Both values are yours. Nothing is assumed here. This is what the hours cost, not an argument for having fewer people.
Invoice corrections: invoices/month × correction rate × $53 × 12. Sourced: AP industry benchmark The $53 per correction figure is published, not made up, and it is the only fixed assumption on this page. Volume and correction rate are yours.
Which of these we can prove later, and which we can’t: Worth saying plainly, because it decides what a real review can and cannot tell you. Days-to-invoice and the cash it ties up come straight out of your own system, from completion date against invoice date in a ServiceTitan or Housecall Pro invoices report. Those we can verify exactly. A true correction rate cannot be pulled honestly from any of the three major platforms, including Jobber. The closest signal only catches corrections made after an invoice is already posted, which is a floor, not a rate. So the correction figure above stays an estimate you set, and we will not pretend otherwise later.
What this is not: An estimate built from ranges you entered in about a minute. It is directionally useful and it is not a substitute for looking at your actual data. Any number here that didn’t come from you is labeled where it appears.