Efficient billing preserves liquidity and reduces financial risk, yet the time from treatment to payment is often long and hard to measure. Hospitals frequently lack a clear view of how long each billing step takes and where delay builds up. Published benchmarks for the Swiss inpatient setting are largely absent. This leaves management without a reliable basis for locating bottlenecks and prioritising improvement in the revenue cycle.

The billing process is treated as a sequence of timed milestones. The analysis uses case-level data for all inpatient cases discharged between 2023 and 2025, with 2025 as the baseline. It measures the interval from discharge to invoice creation and splits it into documentation, coding and invoicing phases. Collection performance, from invoice to payment, is approached in aggregate through Days Sales Outstanding. Quantitative results are interpreted with process knowledge from within the hospital.

Billing turnaround is governed almost entirely by the phase before coding is complete. This delay splits roughly evenly between clinical documentation and coding throughput. Case characteristics such as payer group, admission class and complexity explain little of the variation. The supporting systems are integrated enough to remove most manual re-entry, so fragmented technology is not the binding constraint. The main drivers are instead the speed of documentation sign-off, the coding queue, two turn-of-year administrative cycles, and a growing volume of rework.From these findings the study develops a prioritised set of measures aimed at the pre-coding phase: recording the release-for-coding step consistently across departments, prompting timely documentation sign-off, monitoring the backlog through a report-status dashboard, and managing coding capacity by field. The result is a data-driven basis for locating bottlenecks and a transferable framework for monitoring billing performance in a Swiss inpatient setting.