The Radio Is Not a Rate Sheet

The county closes the bridge on Route 12 on a Wednesday, and the detour adds 14 miles each way to a haul you priced at 9. You call the contractor's PM that afternoon. He's reasonable, you're reasonable, and in four minutes you land on it: $12 more per load, starting Monday, until the bridge reopens. Dispatch hears it. The drivers hear it at the morning meeting. Everybody who touches the job knows the price changed.

Ask who invoices the job. She wasn't on the call. Nobody sent her anything, because the deal was done and everyone went back to work. The rate sheet on her desk still says what it said in March.

That's the third layer of every deal in this business. There's the contract in the drawer and the rate sheet billing prices from, and then there are the spoken amendments. The detour bump. The winter conditions adder. The "we'll knock fifty cents off while the washout gets fixed." Hauling work reprices itself at the speed of weather and equipment, and most of that repricing happens out loud. The billing office prices from what's written. So from Wednesday afternoon on, the job has two prices: the one in force on the radio and the one in force on paper. Every ticket bills against paper.

Nobody calls to pay you more

Follow the money after the call. The job runs five more weeks behind that bump. Three trucks, four loads a day each, call it 60 loads a week, right at 300 loads. At $12 a load that's $3,600 of detour money, agreed to by a customer who shook on it, and the month-end invoice asks him for none of it.

So what catches it? The PM approved the bump, but the invoice that arrives is smaller than the one he budgeted, and no AP department on earth kicks back an invoice for running low. Maybe he notices and figures you decided to eat the detour. Probably he doesn't notice at all, because nobody reconciles an invoice hunting for charges that should be on it. On your side, the invoice matches the rate sheet, the rate sheet matches the contract, and every count reconciles. The only place the $12 exists is in two people's memory of a phone call.

The reverse direction is louder and worse for the relationship. Say the spoken term was a concession: you agreed to shave fifty cents a ton while your loader was down and loads ran slow. Billing never heard that either, so the invoice goes out at full rate. This one gets caught, because catching high invoices is somebody's job over there. Now you're cutting a credit for a discount you already gave, and the PM who took your word on the phone has learned to check your invoices against his notes. The same silence that eats your detour bump spends your goodwill on the concession.

flowchart TD
  A["Phone call: $12/load bump, starts Monday"] --> B{"Written where billing can see it?"}
  B -- no --> C["Rate sheet still shows the March rate"]
  C --> D["Invoice goes out at the March rate: $3,600 gone"]
  B -- yes --> E["Billing rule: new rate, effective Monday"]
  E --> F["Monday's tickets price at Monday's rate"]

A spoken rate expires overnight

Here's the position, and plenty of owners who run on their word will bristle at it. A price change that hasn't reached your billing office by the end of the day it was agreed should be counted as money you've already given away, gone until you can prove otherwise.

The usual answer is that your word is good and so is your customer's, and both things are true and neither helps. Honesty isn't the failure mode. The PM who agreed to $12 isn't going to dispute it; he's just never going to be asked. You aren't going to forget the bump exists; you're going to forget which Monday it started, whether it covered the Saturday loads, and whether it ended when the bridge reopened or when the job did. Every one of those details is a dollar amount, and in eight weeks the only record of any of them is what two busy people can reconstruct on a phone call neither wants to make. A term that lives in memory doesn't hold its value. It erodes a detail at a time until settling for the old rate is easier than arguing for the new one.

The month-end true-up doesn't rescue it either. A true-up built on "didn't we say twelve bucks?" isn't billing, it's renegotiation, and renegotiation after the work is done starts from the other side's number.

End every call with a rate that lands somewhere

The fix costs one sentence and one habit. The sentence closes the call: "I'll send that in writing today." The habit is that the writing goes where invoices come from, not into a text thread or a job folder. A spoken term becomes real when it becomes a billing rule: this job, this amount, effective this date, ended by this event. The one-line email that creates it does double duty, because the PM now holds paper he can hand his own AP, and your month-end invoice stops being the first written record of the deal.

Once the rule exists where billing lives, the machinery is ordinary. Tickets get digitized as they come in, so Monday's loads land against Monday's rate and last Friday's land against the old one, with the split falling on the effective date instead of on somebody's recollection. Invoice totals get assembled from rules that carry their own dates, so the detour bump ends when the bridge reopens because the rule says so. And a ticket that shows up under a job whose only current price is verbal has no rule to price against. That's exactly the kind of ticket that should get flagged for a person instead of quietly billed at whatever the sheet said in March. Termco's part is keeping that machinery honest: the rules structured, the tickets captured against them, the totals built from nothing else.

There's a fifteen-minute audit hiding in your own building. Ask dispatch and whoever runs your jobs to list every price adjustment they believe is currently in force: bumps, adders, temporary breaks, handshake anything. Then set that list against the rates billing is actually applying this week. Every mismatch is an invoice going out wrong right now, in one direction or the other, and expect the list to run longer than you'd have guessed.

If you'd rather have a second set of eyes, send 10-20 sample tickets to hi@termco.ai, ideally from a job where the price moved mid-stream, and we'll send back what we find within 48 hours.