How to collect your placement fees in 5 days, not 30

The billing process is where agencies lose the most money. Here's how to cut the cycle from weeks to days.

Where the money actually gets lost

Most agencies focus on speeding up the recruitment process. Few focus on speeding up the billing process. That's a mistake — because a 30-day billing cycle on a $10,000 fee means you're financing your client's operations for a month.

Multiply that by 5-10 active clients and you have a significant cash flow problem that has nothing to do with how good you are at recruiting.

The 5 reasons invoices take 3 weeks to get approved

• The invoice was sent by email and got buried in the inbox
• The approver wasn't the person you sent it to
• The invoice had an error (wrong RFC, wrong amount, wrong retención)
• The client's accounts payable has a weekly processing cycle
• Nobody followed up

Most of these are solvable with process — not with more follow-up calls.

The 5-day billing cycle

Day 1: Candidate accepts, invoice is created immediately

The moment the candidate signs the offer, you create the invoice — not when you "have time" at the end of the week. The client data (RFC, fiscal address, retención) should already be in your CRM from day one of the relationship. Creating the invoice should take 2 minutes.

Day 2: Send the approval link, not a PDF

Instead of attaching a PDF to an email, send a link. The client opens it from their phone, reviews the invoice, and approves it with one click. The approval is timestamped and logged automatically.

Day 3-4: Approval happens

When the process is this simple, approvals happen fast. The average approval time for invoice links is under 24 hours. Compare that to the 3-week average for email-based invoices.

Day 5: Payment is initiated

With a formally approved invoice already in the system, clients' accounts payable teams process it in the next payment cycle. You've removed every friction point that causes delays.