Quote to cash: five handoffs where service businesses lose money

Ask a service business owner where they lose money and they will usually name a big, visible problem: a bad customer, a price war, an expensive van. The quieter losses are harder to see because they happen between people: the enquiry nobody followed up, the extra work nobody invoiced, the payment nobody chased.

Here are the five handoffs where we see the most leakage, and the check that closes each one.

1. Enquiry to follow-up

The leak: an enquiry arrives on a personal WhatsApp, a website form or a phone call, and nobody owns the reply. By the time someone does, the customer has booked a competitor.

The check: every enquiry becomes a record with an owner, the same day. Review "new and not contacted" daily. If an enquiry has no owner, it has no future.

2. Quote to acceptance

The leak: quotes go out and nobody follows up. Or a quote is accepted by phone, but the accepted version was never recorded, so the job is booked at an old price.

The check: track every quote's status (sent, accepted, declined, expired) and follow up on anything sent more than a few days ago. Let customers accept the exact quote they were sent, from a link, so there is no argument about what was agreed.

3. Acceptance to job

The leak: the accepted quote is retyped into a job sheet. Items get dropped, quantities change, the extra treatment the customer agreed to never makes it to the technician.

The check: create the job from the accepted quote, carrying its products and prices. Nothing is retyped, so nothing is lost.

4. Job to invoice

The leak: this is the biggest one. The work is done, but the invoice waits for paperwork: the service report in the van, the extra materials nobody wrote down, the job that was finished on a Friday afternoon. Some of it is invoiced weeks late, some never.

The check: every completed job should show whether it has been invoiced. Review "completed and not invoiced" weekly, and invoice from the job itself the day the report is signed. For contracts, let recurring invoices generate on schedule rather than relying on a monthly reminder.

5. Invoice to payment

The leak: invoices go out and nobody chases them. Payments arrive but are not matched, so the customer who paid gets a reminder and the one who did not is forgotten.

The check: allocate every payment against specific invoices, so each customer's balance is right. Chase overdue invoices on a schedule: a reminder a few days after the due date, a call after two weeks. Automate the first reminder so it never depends on someone's memory.

Where to start

Do not try to fix all five at once. Pull one month of completed jobs and check how many were invoiced, how late, and for how much compared with the accepted quote. That one exercise usually shows which handoff is costing you most.

How Orbit handles it

Orbit keeps the whole chain on one set of records: WhatsApp enquiries become leads, quotations are accepted from a link, accepted quotations become jobs with their products, and jobs become invoices in one step. Payments are allocated against invoices, and automations can send the first overdue reminder for you. The assistant can answer "which completed jobs are not invoiced yet?" in plain language.