The Invoice I Sent Three Weeks Late for a Number I Made Up

The Whitaker file sat on the corner of my desk so long it stopped being paperwork and became furniture. At some point I quit thinking of it as something to deal with and started thinking of it as structural support. It was holding up a lamp. Doing a fine job of it, too.

Six weeks.

The survey was finished. Monuments set, plat recorded, Whitaker happy, nobody threatening anybody. By the standards of this business that is a fairy tale ending. There was just one small administrative item outstanding, which was getting paid, and in order to send the man an invoice I first had to answer a question that turned out to be harder than it had any right to be.

What did we actually do out there?

You would think I would know. I own the company. That has proven less helpful over the years than you might imagine.

The file was not exactly overflowing with clues

I opened it expecting enlightenment. What I found was a signed proposal, a copy of the recorded plat, and one sticky note in my own handwriting that said "back for NE corner?"

Question mark included. That question mark was carrying more responsibility than some employees I have had.

So I did what any sophisticated business owner does when his recordkeeping fails him. I walked around the office asking people what they remembered.

Danny said three days. Danny was very confident about three days. Danny is confident about most things. If you asked him what the weather was doing next March he would look off toward the horizon and give you a number.

Wes said two and a half. He remembered a Friday that turned into a half day on account of either the rain or the truck, he was not particular about which. Then he thought about it a while longer and said, "That might have been Petrie."

We were really closing in on it now.

Exhibit A, the truck log

Then I checked the mileage.

Sixty-two miles on a day nobody had mentioned. Whitaker's place is thirty-one miles from the office, which is the kind of arithmetic that does not leave you much room to argue with yourself. Somebody had gone back out there, and it was almost certainly for that northeast corner.

And from somewhere in the foggy attic where I keep thirty-some years of this company, I remembered telling somebody to go. I am fairly sure I was standing at a parts counter when I said it.

Why I can recall the parts counter and not the job is a question I have stopped asking. That is what a few decades in this business does to a person's head. It throws out the load-bearing information and lovingly preserves the fact that the fellow ahead of you in line was buying a lawnmower belt.

Nobody wrote the trip down. Including me.

Especially me.

The $61.40 mystery

Then there was a receipt. Hardware store, eleven miles from the site, correct week, sixty-one dollars and forty cents, no explanation of any kind.

Could have been rebar and caps. Could have been a chainsaw blade. Could have been three bags of beef jerky and a pair of gloves for all I knew. But it was in the truck paperwork and the date lined up, and I had already spent more of my morning being Sherlock Holmes than the job could support.

Materials. $61.40. Moving on.

How to build an invoice out of memory, mileage and prayer

This is where land surveying invoicing gets interesting.

You take Danny's three days and shave it down some, because Danny rounds up. You take Wes's two and a half and mostly set it aside, because he may have been describing a different job in a different county. You add the return trip, because the mileage is the only witness in this investigation that has not changed its story. You add the mysterious sixty-one forty.

Then you sit and look at it. Lean back. Take a sip of coffee. Squint a little. And eventually you arrive at a number that feels right.

That is what I sent Whitaker.

Do not misunderstand me. It was not dishonest. If he had called the next morning and asked about any line on it, I could have walked him through the whole thing, and it would have held, because the work was done and the number was reasonable.

It was defensible. Defensible and correct are not quite the same animal. What I sent that man was a guess wearing a necktie.

The part where I quietly charge myself instead

Here is what actually happens when the records are fuzzy. You shade everything toward the client. At least I do.

If I cannot prove we spent the full day, I do not bill the full day. If I cannot remember whether the return trip ran two hours or four, I bill two. If I am not certain that eighty dollars of material belongs to that job, the company eats it. Because I would rather leave a little on the table than get on the phone and say, "Well sir, nobody wrote this down, but Danny feels strongly about it."

Nobody wants that conversation. So somewhere inside the Whitaker invoice I gave something away. Half a day, maybe. Some travel. Materials. Possibly all three.

I will never know which, and that is the sneaky part, because it does not turn up anywhere as a loss. Nobody writes down:

Lost today because Gus could not remember what happened six weeks ago: $347.50

The money simply never becomes an invoice. It evaporates.

Twice a year I become an accountant

Every so often a few of these pile up at once, and that is when I turn into an accountant. Not a good one. More of an amateur archaeologist with a calculator.

Truck log open, handwritten time notes, three browser tabs, somebody's fuel receipt, a legal pad, and a cup of coffee that has gone cold enough to qualify as road base. And then I start excavating my own company.

"Who was on Ackerman?" ... "What was Ackerman?"

"Was that Tuesday?"

"Did you not go back out there?"

"No, that was Petrie."

"You sure?"

"No."

Beautiful. Meanwhile the phone is ringing and somebody needs a proposal by Thursday. Running a survey company has a funny way of making you do every job except surveying.

The jobs that did not need me

Here is the part that finally got under my skin.

While the Whitaker file sat there holding up my lamp, four other jobs finished and went out almost on their own. I did not hunt down Danny for any of them. I did not ask Wes to recall a Thursday from six weeks back. I did not squint at a gas receipt like it was evidence in a murder trial. The hours were already on the jobs. So was the travel, so were the materials. By the time the work was done, most of the invoice had built itself.

Those four did not need me at all, and that is exactly how it ought to be.

I used to figure I did not need much of a system, because I knew what my crews were doing. Small outfit, good people, and I have been at this thirty-some years. Except I did not know what my crews were doing. I knew approximately what they were doing. What I actually had, six weeks later, was whatever three tired surveyors could recall over coffee. There is a difference, and it costs about three hundred and fifty dollars a pop.  At least.

Which is the whole argument for something like QuickBooks integration for land surveyors, and I say that as a man who resisted it for years. Not because bookkeeping software is exciting. It is not. I have seen gravel piles with more charisma. It matters because the closer the job record sits to the invoice, the less archaeology anybody has to do later.

Money that disappears does not make any noise

A client who does not pay gets your full attention. You send statements. You make calls. You remember his name, and you may work up a nickname for him that cannot be printed on a family blog.

But a half day you never billed does not make a sound. The unrecorded trip does not complain. The eighty dollars in materials does not write you a letter. The three hours nobody entered do not show up in December holding a little sign that says HERE IS MONEY YOU LOST.

They are just gone. And it is almost never one big mistake. It is fifty small ones nobody noticed. Twenty here, an hour there, a trip nobody entered, a crew day remembered a little wrong.

Money that leaves quietly has a terrible habit of staying gone.

Whitaker paid without asking a single question

I sent the invoice Tuesday. He paid it Thursday. No questions, no complaints, nothing at all.

Which naturally made me wonder whether I should have charged more.

But I am trying to grow as a person, so I have chosen not to think about that.

Mostly.

If you have a file on the corner of your desk that has been there long enough to qualify as office furniture, run one real job through Kudurru Stone and see whether the next invoice can tell you what happened without gathering the crew for a historical reenactment.

Seven days, free, no credit card, and nobody is going to call you about it.

If nothing else you might get your lamp back.

Gus-ism: If your invoicing system requires three witnesses and a truck odometer, you do not have an invoicing system. You have a campfire story.