This whole book is about finishing, so let me give you the bookkeeper's definition of the word, because it's stricter than yours: a sale is finished when the money lands. Not when the work ships. When the money lands.
I know where finished work goes to die. It isn't the trash — nobody throws away finished work. It goes to the receivables page. In more than twenty years of keeping books, the receivables page was the most quietly heartbreaking document I handled, month after month: a graveyard of completed things. Deliveries made, accepted, praised even — and the invoices aging in thirty-day columns like produce going soft. Sixty days. Ninety. The work was done. The finishing wasn't.
And here's the finding that surprises everyone except bookkeepers: I have watched more businesses die of slow collection than of no sales. Read that again, because the whole world tells you sales is the life-or-death skill. These businesses had sales. The revenue was real, earned, on the books — and the cash arrived too late to pay for the payroll and the rent that earning it required. A business can starve to death with a full pantry, if the pantry is receivables. Chapter 9 told you the tank is the truth; this chapter is about the leak between earning and the tank.