You get a sales order from your customer – a work order for you. You start filling it right away, are all stressed out by the deadline, the materials needed and so on. Once it’s all done, you are happy you can finally deliver the goods and the shipment is done. Did you send the invoice with the shipment? 

If you’re invoicing is done ad hoc, sometimes right away with the shipment, sometimes a week later you’re facing a risk of not invoicing the client at all. Moreover, your clients need to account for the goods without an invoice – I am sure you can imagine how problematic this can be in accounting at least. So why put someone else through the same problem?

Now, back to the risk of not invoicing. Not sending out an invoice to your customers does mean you don’t get any sales revenue – no revenue or profit from the transfer of goods (which is already done evidently).

The way you can tackle this risk is making sure you always send an invoice with every shipping – keep an overview of customers’ sales orders, mark shipped orders “shipped” and right at the same time form an invoice with all relevant details and mark the order also “invoiced”. Don’t do the last thing prior to actually having the invoice with the shipment physically (or prior you have sent out the invoice by e-mail for an example).