Finance - Issuing a Final Invoice and Closing a Job

Confirm every PO linked to the job has a matching supplier invoice. Any gap means an unrecorded cost. Do not issue the final customer invoice until all costs are confirmed or accrued.

Match every delivery note to its PO. Unmatched delivery notes indicate goods received but costs not yet captured against the job.

List every approved variation and confirm each has a written reference. Chase any outstanding approvals before the invoice is raised.

Base contract plus approved variations as named line items, minus deposits collected. If retention applies, separate the main invoice from the retention invoice with an explicit trigger date.

Issue from the job record with each variation as a named separate line item including reference and approval date. Send to the billing contact, not just the project contact.

Sync to Xero, QuickBooks, or FreeAgent immediately. An unsynced invoice does not appear in your debtors report or cash flow forecast.

Mark the job as invoiced. If a retention invoice was raised, log the trigger date as a diary reminder so the final retention invoice goes out on the day it becomes due.

We issue the final invoice before all sub-contractor costs have come in - then discover a week later that the job margin is much lower than we thought.

Approved variations get rolled into a single invoice total instead of appearing as separate line items, which causes disputes when clients query what they're paying for.

The final invoice goes to the project manager who forwarded it to accounts - by the time it reaches the right person we are already past the payment due date.