The views expressed by the author are their own and do not represent the views of Energy Workforce & Technology Council.
The crew finished the work and the customer signed the ticket. What happens between that signature and the payment decides how long your company waits for its money.
Michael Maltsev, CEO, RigER Inc. · Oct 26, 2026
Ask anyone who runs an energy services company where the hard part of a job is, and they will point to the field. They are right. But a job can also go wrong in a second place, and that place gets far less attention: the stretch between an approved field ticket and money in the bank.
By the time a ticket is approved, the hard work is done. It is complete, signed by the customer’s representative, checked against the service level agreement and released for billing. Getting paid should be the easy part. Yet plenty of invoices for perfectly good work sit in a customer’s dispute queue for 60 days, because something on the invoice gave the reviewer a reason to stop. A wrong rate, a day count that doesn’t match the rental records or a missing cost code is enough to send it back, and every trip back restarts the clock.
The companies that get paid quickly aren’t luckier than everyone else. They have a few habits.
Sit in the reviewer’s chair
Somewhere in the operator’s accounts payable department (could be AI), a reviewer has a stack of invoices and limited patience. If yours lines up with their system and answers every question before they ask it, it gets approved. If they have to email someone to find out what a line means, it drops to the bottom of the pile.
Getting it right starts with how the invoice is put together. Every figure on it already exists somewhere: the rate in the agreement, the rental days on the delivery and return records, the hours and quantities on the signed tickets, and serial numbers on all of them. The invoice should pull from those records, not be typed up from scratch. Retyping is where mistakes creep in. A rate typed from memory or a day count added up by hand is exactly what gets an invoice rejected.
Then send the proof along with it. The signed tickets belong behind a service invoice, the delivery and return records behind a rental charge, and the photos and inspection notes behind any charge for damaged or lost equipment. The customer’s PO, AFE and cost codes should appear wherever their system looks for them. A reviewer who has everything in front of them can say yes the first time.
2 jobs that need extra care
Most invoices follow the work in a straight line, but 2 situations trip companies up again and again.
The first is the long rental. If equipment goes out for 6 months and you bill once when it comes back, 6 months of your money has been sitting in the customer’s account instead of yours. Bill long rentals on a regular cycle, monthly or every 28 days, so cash comes in while the job is still running.
The second is the multi-well job. Many operators need charges split by well, by AFE or by cost code. Ask how they want it split before the first invoice goes out. Finding out from a rejection costs you weeks.
5 minutes before it leaves
Before any invoice leaves the office, someone should check that the rates match the agreement for this customer and this job, that the days, hours and item counts match the signed tickets and rental records, and that serial numbers, item codes, PO and AFE are exactly what the customer’s system expects.
On a clean job, that takes about 5 minutes. Skipping it is a false saving. A rejected invoice rarely comes back the next day. It comes back weeks later with a question, to a team that has moved on to other work. Someone has to dig out the records, fix the invoice and resubmit it to the back of the line. A single rejection can easily cost a month.
Fast, and in their format
A reasonable target is to invoice within 1 to 2 days of the signed ticket. Every day an approved ticket waits to be billed adds a day to your collection cycle, and nobody outside your company caused that day.
Format matters just as much. Most operators are specific about how they want invoices: which portal, which fields, which codes. An invoice that doesn’t fit their format won’t be paid, however accurate it is.
A simple way to keep this straight is a 1-page profile for each customer, covering how they want invoices submitted, which codes they require, who approves and what has caused rejections before. A new hire (or AI agent) on the billing team can read it and get a customer right in a day instead of learning through returned invoices. For companies that see turnover in back-office roles, that page saves a lot of grief.
How you know it’s working
Billing can’t be managed on gut feel. 2 numbers tell most of the story.
Days sales outstanding, or DSO, is the average number of days between the work and the payment. It is the most honest number in the process, because a problem anywhere in the chain pushes it up, whether that’s a missing signature, an invoice sitting unsent or a dispute nobody has answered. Track it monthly, and by customer, so a single slow account can’t hide inside a healthy average.
First-pass approval rate is the share of invoices approved without a question or a rejection. When it slips, find the customer, the job type and the mistake behind it, and fix the cause rather than just the invoice in front of you.
Once a month, it is also worth spending an hour looking for work that never got billed, such as signed tickets with no invoice, rental days nobody charged for or damage that was documented and then forgotten. That hour usually pays for itself many times over.
When something goes wrong
Even careful teams make mistakes. When one happens, issue a credit memo, keep the original record and note why the correction was made. Never quietly change an invoice the customer already has. A clean paper trail is part of your credibility with the customer and with your own auditors.
When a customer disputes a charge, answer quickly and answer with documents: the signed ticket, the photos, the clause in the agreement. That is why the evidence was gathered in the field in the first place. A dispute answered within 2 days with records attached usually ends there. A dispute left for 2 weeks tends to harden into a standoff.
Closing the loop
Billing doesn’t create value. The crews and the equipment already did that. Billing’s job is to collect it quickly and without friction. None of these habits change how the work gets done in the field. They change when the money arrives, often by weeks. For most energy services companies, that is one of the cheapest cash flow improvements available, and it keeps good work from waiting 60 days in someone’s dispute queue before it turns into cash.
Energy Workforce partner RigER provides insights on mobile job dispatch.
