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Comment by tadmilbourn | Hacker News Reader

We’re taking a slightly different approach to invoicing for billable hours. From talking with freelancers, independent contractors, agencies, and other professional services companies, we found that there’s a significant delay between when work is done and when the invoice actually goes out. Then, there’s even more delay between when that invoice goes out and when it gets paid.

We’re trying to reduce both of those delays as much as possible.

By sending a notification once hours have been approved, we remove the delay between when the work is done and when someone “runs invoicing.”

By making the notification personable and easily viewed on mobile devices, we increase the speed with which the customers pay.

That’s the general concept! I’d love to hear any feedback and comments the HN community has!

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In my experience as a contractor, the payment period is usually in the contract. The terms I've seen the most are 30 days and my current contract is 35 days.

No amount of reducing friction will reduce that payment period. I know of one contractor who negotiated a higher rate by increasing the period. Companies typically run long invoice cycles, and you don't stand a chance of changing that to anything shorter usually.

That's a fair point. It's going to be tough to change those types of companies because they tend to have people that manage and optimize cash flow (i.e. pay bills on the last day possible without incurring penalties).

From our experience with small businesses Intuit (the Tiempo team is all former Intuit employees), we know there's a large swath of companies that aren't as complicated or as rigorous. For those companies, just getting the bill taken care of and out of the way is a benefit. Those are the companies we'll focus on first.

The first thing that comes to mind is: While the time-spent entries I enter are usually exactly what ends up on invoices, on occasion, this is not the case. An entry might get edited (text description of work done, or even amount of time spent), or deleted, prior to generating the invoice and sending it. The concern here is that if clients are notified "too quickly" about time spent, updates would cause confusion, or there might have arisen certain expectations from the client that would end up not being met.

That's one of the top concerns I have as well. But, as you point out, the majority of the time that's not the case. So far, we've found that the notifications provide better transparency than the more common "here's all the work I did over the last month." I recently had a case with our accountant where I received a bill 3 weeks after the work was done and I totally didn't remember it. I emailed her and then we got on the phone to talk about it. All of that is wasted time (and money).

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