Work in Progress (WIP)
Work in progress is a job you have finished, or partly finished, that has not been invoiced yet. It is real value you have already created, but it is not money — and it will not become money until an invoice exists for it.
What it means
A job moves through three rough states: not started, in progress, and invoiced. Work in progress is everything sitting between "the work happened" and "there is an invoice for it" — a finished repair with no invoice sent, a multi-day job that is two-thirds done, materials already bought and installed but not yet billed.
It matters because it is easy to feel further ahead than you actually are. A pile of finished, unbilled jobs looks like progress — you did the work — but it behaves like nothing has happened yet from a cash perspective, because no invoice means no payment clock has even started.
The fix is not a bigger effort, it is a smaller gap: the shorter the stretch between a job finishing and an invoice going out, the less work in progress ever accumulates. Whether it stays a hidden pile you rediscover on a bad week, or a short list you clear every few days, is the real difference between a business that feels behind and one that does not.
You finish a $600 repair on Tuesday but do not invoice it until the following Monday. For those six days, that $600 is work in progress — done, real, and worth nothing to your bank account until the invoice actually goes out.
Counting a finished-but-unbilled job as money you already have, and spending or planning against it — it stays work in progress, not income, until an invoice exists and is paid.
See also
Where this shows up
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