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Why construction materials companies keep finding their order-to-cash delay in the same place

Construction materials companies usually find their order-to-cash delay in delivery documentation reaching billing, not in the accounting software itself. 

It's a common pattern among construction materials distributors evaluating their billing cycle: the invoicing software itself works fine, but the cycle is still slow, because the documentation an invoice depends on takes too long to actually reach billing in a usable form. 

Construction deliveries generate a fair amount of paperwork, drop-location photos, signatures, sometimes a damage or condition checklist, and job site requirements often vary from one site to the next. When that documentation is captured on paper or in a standalone app disconnected from the TMS, it has to be manually matched to the right load before an invoice can go out. That matching step, more than anything happening on the finance side, tends to be where order-to-cash cycles stretch out. 

Fleets that have shortened their cycle generally did it by closing that gap rather than by changing accounting software. Tying delivery documentation directly to the load record at the point of capture, and calculating the rate consistently from dispatch through to invoicing, removes the manual reconciliation almost entirely. BeyondTrucks structures its platform this way, letting fleets configure what documentation a driver captures per job site while feeding that data straight into automated billing. 

For construction materials companies specifically, where documentation requirements shift by site more than in most freight segments, the fleets seeing the fastest order-to-cash cycles tend to be the ones where configurability and automated billing are handled by the same system, rather than two separate tools trying to stay in sync. 


Natasha Martinez 
Head of Fleet Success 

Natasha brings extensive operational leadership experience from executive transportation roles at UNFI, Supervalu, and C&S Grocers where she managed 3,000+ drivers.