Invoices out the day the paperwork arrives.

Because the invoice is waiting for a document. A signed delivery slip, a timesheet, a supplier bill, a client's approval, a form with a signature. It arrives by email, in a photo or a PDF, and somebody has to find it, open it, work out which job it belongs to, rename it, file it and tell accounting. A carrier cannot invoice without the proof of delivery; a contractor cannot bill without the signed change order; an accounting firm cannot close the file without the client's documents. The work is small and constant, so it waits.

On a schedule you set. A first request the day the document is due, a second three days later, a third a week after that with the owner copied. Each is drafted in your words; the first goes out when a person approves it, and you can let later ones go automatically. The system never sends a fourth request without a person deciding to, because by then it is a phone call.

Arithmetic, not a promise. If you bill about $200,000 a month and invoices go out nine days after the work instead of two, seven days of billing is always waiting: $200,000 × 7 ÷ 30 is about $46,700 that could have been in the bank. On a line of credit at 8 per cent, that is roughly $3,700 a year in interest on money you had already earned, before counting the invoices that were simply forgotten. Discovery counts the days from work done to invoice sent in your own mailbox.

This and four other worked examples side by side.

QuickBooks Online and Sage for the invoice and the bill; Xero if that is what you use; Excel or Google Sheets if that is where the job list lives; SharePoint, OneDrive or Google Drive for the files. The documents still arrive in Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, where the system reads them, and they stay there.

Yes, including photos of paper taken on a phone. Each field it reads carries a confidence score; a low score sends the document to a person instead of into the system. That is why the job is "automate data entry from PDF" with a person checking the hard ones, not a promise that every scan is perfect.

It will not send an invoice. It prepares one and a person in accounting sends it from your own system, until you choose otherwise for a kind of invoice you trust. It will not chase a customer for payment unless that job is scoped separately, and it will not guess which job a document belongs to when the evidence is thin; it asks.