Looking at things from the perspective of financial gain, you can break all sorts of parts down into measurements. And the more accurate measurements you take, the more carefully you can adjust your products, services, invoices, and many other different aspects of your business goals. Without proper measurements, it is impossible to follow trends, and that’s a good way to make mistakes on many different levels as far as personal financing goes.

Specifically, from the point of invoicing, consider how different precision measurements can a fact positive or negative financial movements. In an industrial context, there are flow meters that have extremely accurate readouts of substances going back and forth through containers. We all know the importance of accurate gas and electrical meters for residences regarding our monthly bills. For cell phone companies, recognizing the importance of data flow accuracy is vital. And, as a contractor or an hourly worker, you can think of the invoicing as regarding the flow of time.

Flow Meters

Geared toward industrial uses, using flow meters to maintain accurate counts of material and substance use is a cornerstone of sound business operations. Perhaps your infrastructure uses oil. How do you know how much oil is moving through a pipeline? To answer that, you will have a flow meter installed somewhere along the chain. With these hyper-accurate readings, it is possible to understand the entirety of material used for a project, and thereby have an extremely accurate way of measuring how much to charge for this material.

Gas and Electrical Meters for Residences

Every month, everyone who owns a home is particularly aware of how much gas and electricity they use. Power companies use gas and electrical meters so that they can invoice every individual customer as necessary. Some months there will be an estimate because a worker cannot come through to check the numbers. But in most cases, meter readers will come out and see down to the penny how much you owe because of the flow of electricity and gas.

Data Flow Accuracy

If you pay attention to your cell phone bills, you’ll get a readout of how much data you use through your various connective technologies. You’ll find out how much data you use on LTE bandwidths. You’ll find out how much information has gone back and forth through Wi-Fi services. To charge you correctly, cell phone companies and internet service providers need to have extremely accurate counts of the packets of digital data that run across all of these networks.

The Flow of Time

When you think a little bit more abstractly, you can consider invoicing concerning the flow of time. In other words, if you are invoicing for an hour’s worth of work, that means that you spent sixty minutes using your flow of time to create company value. If you think of the image of an hourglass, the flow of time is physically represented. Invoicing for that concept of movement is the basis of hourly contract work.