Standard problems of billing were:

Upon studying how various service bureaus billed their clients and compensated their medical transcriptionists, it quickly became obvious that battle lines had long been drawn over definitions of page counts, line counts and who got paid by what standard. In short, we encountered a lot of scar tissue surrounding the lack of standardized formats and fairness in compensation.

Our Simplified billing:

We have derived a formula which uses an average words dictated per minute and words transcribed per minute. Our clients are charged per minute of dictatation, accurately broken into 1/100th of a minute units. This system is accurate, predictable and no one spends time counting words per line or quibbles about type font spacing.

Our charges for delivered transcription is $2.25 per minute. A client's bill reads similar to a phone bill for long-distance phone services, charged in 1/100th of a minute units. Currently, our minute charges equate to 18 cents per line.

Save! We offer our clients a 5% "Early Bird" discount if the check reaches us by the 10^th day of the billing month.

Using this system simplifies matters immensely:

• Since the computer logs each report to the 1/100th of a minute, depending on the amount of recorded time, the client's bill is extremely straightforward, resembling the billing received for long-distance phone services.

• Alert & Oriented can provide its clients with nicely-formatted, more easily readable reports that do not depend on having to squeeze as many words as possible onto each page or line.

By using this type of billing, we think we have found a solution which is fair to the client, fair to the medical transcriptionist, and fair to management. As a result of using this pricing technique, the entire war zone over line counts, page counts, font sizes or any other type of variable in billing and/or formatting becomes a non-issue.