A ball valve priced out at twelve hundred dollars
A whole stick of pipe was attached where one foot belonged, and it had been that way long enough that nobody questioned it.
A tech built a small repair and the number came back at four figures. He assumed he had done something wrong, cleared it, and built it again. Same answer.
The material behind that valve was a ten-foot stick of pipe, attached at a quantity of one. The job needed three feet. So every time anybody touched that service, the estimate carried seven feet of pipe nobody was installing, marked up, on a ticket a homeowner was going to read.
Nobody entered a wrong price. Somebody entered a right price against the wrong quantity, which is harder to see and lives longer.
The fix took a minute per line. The cost of it running was every tech who met that line either quoting from memory to dodge the number, or turning a screen around and watching a customer’s face change.
What I keep coming back to is that the shop had a good book by every visible measure. Clean names, real costs, current pricing. The error was one column over from anywhere anybody was looking, and it only ever showed up in the driveway.
Take your five most-used materials that come in sticks or rolls and check the quantity on each service that calls them. One foot of pipe is 0.1 of a ten-foot stick, and it should be entered that way.
The notebook is where this turned up. If you want it fixed rather than described, that is a free pricebook audit, over at Titan Tech Tools.
One question a week.
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