Invoices that go out on the day the skip comes back

Ask a skip hire owner when they invoice and the answer is usually a day of the week. Friday, mostly. Someone sits down with the week's tickets and works through them.

That answer contains the whole problem. The invoice is not attached to the job — it is attached to a ritual, and the gap between the two is where the money goes.

Four things that happen in the gap

Details fade. On the day, everyone knows the skip went out on the 3rd, came back on the 21st, and had a mattress in it. By Friday week, the only record of that is a ticket and whatever the driver remembers. Extended hire and surcharges get missed here, not out of dishonesty but because nobody has the facts in front of them.

Jobs disappear. A completed job with no invoice is invisible unless something is specifically looking for it. Nothing on paper is. We put numbers on this in what the paper diary really costs, and unbilled work is consistently the single largest line.

Payment terms start late. If you invoice on average five days after completion, and your terms are 30 days, your real terms are 35. On a business turning over a million pounds, five days of sales sitting in a tray is roughly £13,700 of cash you have earned and cannot use.

Queries arrive cold. A customer questioning an invoice ten days after the event has forgotten the job as thoroughly as you have. The same query on the day it happens is answered in one call.

An invoice raised on the day is not just faster. It is more accurate, because the facts are still in the room.

Invoice on completion, not on a day

The change worth making is small to describe and awkward to implement on paper: the invoice should be raised when the job is marked complete, from the job's own record, rather than assembled later from tickets.

That means the completion event has to carry everything the invoice needs — the dates the skip was out, the size, the agreed price, the permit, and anything that happened. Which in turn means the driver's record of the collection is not just an operational note, it is the beginning of the bill. Photos and timestamps from the collection are what make a surcharge stick.

Do that and Friday afternoon stops being an invoicing session. It becomes a review of exceptions — the four jobs that need a decision, rather than the sixty that do not.

The charges that go missing

Worth listing, because most yards can name their own worst offender immediately.

• Extended hire. The most common by distance. Skips come back late as a matter of routine. Whether that is charged depends on whether anyone compares two dates.
• Overweight loads. Known at the weighbridge, forgotten by the time the invoice is raised, unless the weight lands on the job rather than on a ticket.
• Prohibited or surcharged items. Mattresses, plasterboard, fridges, tyres. Real costs to you, easily lost.
• Wasted journeys. Blocked access, gate locked, site not ready. A cost you absorbed and a charge in your terms that nobody applied.
• The exchange charged as one lift. Two movements, one line on the invoice.

None of these are new to anyone in the trade. That is the point — they are all known, and they are all missed, because knowing about a charge in general is different from remembering it on the twelfth invoice of a Friday afternoon.

Make the customer's next step easy

Getting the invoice out promptly is half. The other half is removing every obstacle between the invoice and the payment.

Send it by email, on the day, with the job reference and the address on it so the customer can identify it without ringing. Put a way to pay on the invoice itself — a card link is the difference between a builder paying on their phone while sitting in the van and putting it in a pile to deal with at month end. Let them download it again themselves rather than ringing to ask for a copy, which is one of the three calls that eats an office afternoon.

For trade accounts, a statement they can pull up for themselves does more for collections than a chasing call, because most late payment is not refusal, it is administration.

Chasing, without the awkwardness

The reason overdue invoices go unchased is rarely that people are relaxed about money. It is that chasing requires someone to work out who is overdue, find the invoice, and make an uncomfortable call — three frictions, any one of which is enough for it to be tomorrow's job.

Remove the first two. A list of what is overdue, by how long, with the invoice attached, turns a dreaded afternoon into ten minutes. Most of those calls are pleasant, because most late payers have simply lost the invoice and are mildly embarrassed.

The point about cash

Skip hire is capital-heavy. Vehicles, containers, tip fees paid before customers pay you. The gap between money out and money in is the thing that constrains how fast a yard can grow, and it is far more often the reason a business feels tight than the margin on a lift.

Invoicing on completion does not increase your prices or win you a customer. It just stops you lending your customers money for free, and stops you giving away work you already paid to deliver.

SkipHub raises the invoice from the job — dates, size, price, permit and anything the driver recorded — and lets the customer download and pay it from their own link. The features pages cover invoicing and the portal, and the pricing page is one number with no per-seat charges.