Completed Work Not Invoiced: Check the Gap Between Work and Billing

By ProWorkstack · Editorial and development process

Match completed billable work with issued invoices, explain legitimate differences and isolate the amount still worth investigating.

Use your figures: Open the calculator. All amounts in the examples are illustrative and can be read in one currency of your choice.

Choose a billable population, not the whole sales pipeline

A CRM total can include proposals, cancelled deals and work scheduled for next month. An invoice total may include tax, deposits or several stages of an older project. Subtracting those two headline totals can produce a large number that has little to do with missing invoices.

Define the population first: completed work eligible for billing in a specific period. Keep a customer or project identifier, completion date, billable value and billing status for each record. Compare invoice lines against that population, not against every deal marked as won.

Build a reconciliation sheet that explains the difference

For each eligible record, capture the linked invoice number, invoice date and comparable invoiced amount. Separate tax if your CRM value excludes tax. Put genuine timing differences, agreed credits, discounts and excluded work into an adjustments column. A deposit should not become a duplicate charge when the final invoice is issued.

Use one currency and the same reporting basis. A currency selector formats numbers; it does not translate a CRM export in one currency into an accounting export in another. If a project appears across several invoices, add the matching lines before deciding it is short.

Calculate the unexplained amount

Signed variance = eligible billable value − matching invoice value. Unexplained gap = the positive remainder after known legitimate adjustments. In the calculator, a negative variance is visible, but the estimated positive leakage opportunity is floored at zero.

For example, a quarter contains 125,000 of eligible completed work and 112,000 of matching invoices. The signed difference is 13,000. If 3,000 is explained by valid timing or adjustments, 10,000 remains for review. Annualizing that quarter gives 40,000 only if the quarter is representative.

Review the exceptions before calling them lost revenue

Start with the largest unexplained rows. Check draft invoices, missing purchase-order approvals, customer naming differences and work recorded under the wrong project. Also examine the opposite direction: an invoice without a matching operational record can indicate a duplicate, a mapping problem or an incomplete CRM population.

A negative variance does not automatically mean fraud or overbilling. Likewise, the positive gap is not cash already lost. Some items may be billable later; others may prove ineligible. Record the resolution so next month’s check does not rediscover the same explained difference.

Connect the check to the right operating question

If the underlying work is legal time that was never recorded, investigate unrecorded billable hours. If invoices were issued but a subscription payment failed, use failed-payment recovery. Keeping these checks separate makes the next action clearer and prevents double counting.

Work through your own numbers

Use the completed work not invoiced calculator to test a baseline and a cautious improvement. Check the calculation guide if you need help with currencies, sharing or assumptions.

Prepared by ProWorkstack. Examples are constructed calculations, not customer results. See our editorial standards.